A four-hour play based on one of the few novels Donald Trump has enjoyed and admired is to get its UK premiere at the Manchester international festival.

Ivo van Hove will bring his adaptation of The Fountainhead to the biennial July festival, alongside new commissions from artists including Maxine Peake, Janelle Monáe, Skepta, Yoko Ono and Idris Elba.

The director David Lynch will be celebrated with movie screenings, music gigs and the largest ever UK exhibition of his visual art.

There will be 20 UK and world premieres in the second festival under the leadership of John McGrath, it was announced on Thursday.

McGrath said it was interesting how many artists were looking to the future, “some with hope, some with imagination and some with concern”.

“There is a lot about utopia, interestingly. Back in 2017 there was a lot of work that was quite angry with the situation politically, but we’re finding people more and more trying to find ways through, find different paths, find dreams of the future,” he said.

Van Hove, one of the most in demand stage directors, brings his Internationaal Theater Amsterdam to the Lowry to perform what has been called his most controversial work: an adaptation of The Fountainhead, a 1943 novel by the free-market fundamentalist Ayn Rand.

The book has a cult following, with Trump saying it is one of the few works of fiction he enjoyed. The home secretary, Sajid Javid, has said he reads certain passages twice a year.

It has been staged in the US and Europe but not the UK. The Guardian’s Andrew Todd, reviewing the 2014 production at the Avignon festival, praised it as a “fresh and complex” rereading of the novel.

McGrath said he thought it was important to understand the breadth of political opinion of the times we live in. He added: “I think what Ivo is doing with this piece is exploring what that text is and how it has come to mean the things that it has come to mean.”

The actor Maxine Peake returns to the festival with the director Sarah Frankcom. They and an all-female creative team will pay tribute to the German singer and actor Nico – who spent the last decade of her life in Salford and Manchester – at the Stoller Hall.

Peake said she got into Nico as a teenager because of her love of The Velvet Underground. “Nico really broke the mould and she is so influential on a lot of modern female artists.”

The Nico Project has been inspired by the avant-garde 1968 album she made with John Cale, The Marble Index. It is a “deep, complex and uncomfortable” album, said Peake. “I’ve never done anything like this before and that is exciting.”

Lynch will in effect take over the arts venue Home for the duration of the festival.

For many, Lynch is one of the most brilliant and enigmatic directors of his generation with a list of films that include Blue Velvet, Dune and Mulholland Drive. On TV, he directed the groundbreaking Twin Peaks.

His visual art is less well known, particularly in the UK. There was a small show of his painting and photography at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (Mima) in 2014 but nothing like the scale planned for Manchester.

Before the Mima show, Lynch said: “I’ve always been a painter and all I’ve really wanted to do since I was little was be a painter. The thing that happened was painting led to cinema.”

The 200th anniversary of the Peterloo massacre will be marked at the Bridgewater Hall with a piece of music by the composer Emily Howard and the poet Michael Symmons Roberts.

Among the music projects are an opening night show by the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Monáe and a Queens of the Electronic Underground show brought together by BBC Radio 6’s Mary Anne Hobbs.

Some of the summer events defy easy categorisation. For example, a collaboration involving the choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the writer Lolita Chakrabarti, the Rambert dance company and Leo Warner of 59 productions. They are taking over the city’s forgotten Mayfield railway station and depot in a project inspired by Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Invisible Cities. They promise theatre, choreography, music and architectural design.

• Manchester international festival takes place 4-21 July.