1,721,001 research outputs found
House of Women premiere at "Video Screening", Artist’s Films at The Swiss Church London
No full textFirst London screening of House of Women (2016), a single channel film, the first of a trilogy of films.
Swiss art collective Annelore Schneider and Claude Piguet curated an evening of short videos by Swiss and British artists.
featuring recent works by
collectif_fact (Annelore Schneider & Claude Piguet)
Consuelo Frauenfelder & Stefan Lauper
Katie Goodwin
Simon Senn
Michelle Williams Gamaker
Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2021
No full textCurated open exhibition selected with artists Hew Locke, Tai Shani and Michelle Williams Gamaker. Shown at Firstsite, Colchester touring to South London Gallery
Michelle Williams Gamaker in conversation, Artsadmin
No full textArtist Michelle Williams Gamaker who will discuss the production of her new work ‘The Fruit is There to be Eaten’ based on British directors Powell and Pressburger’s film ‘Black Narcissus’ (1947). To echo the film having been shot at Shepperton Studios (despite being set in India), the video is shot in Sands Film Studios, Rotherhithe.
In the 1939 Rumer Godden novel of the same name, the relationships between an Indian lower-caste dancing girl and two British missionary nuns were primarily established on colonial benevolence. Michelle's work addresses this dynamic by having these characters come to recognise that they are trapped in a film set in 2017, marking 70 years of Indian Independence.
Michelle’s work explores the legacy of colonialism, to provoke in viewers a revision of the traditional roles of women – as well as the hegemony of gender binaries – in the patriarchal structure of colonialism
The Bang Straws
No full textThe Bang Straws is an aesthetically invigorating reworking of the casting process of Sidney Franklin’s The Good Earth (1937) a film notorious for a white actor’s racist portrayal of a Chinese character. German-American actress Luise Rainer won the high-profile lead of O-Lan, the farmer's wife. To play O-Lan, Rainer wore racist “yellowface”, as so many 20th Century Hollywood and British actors did.
Despite Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong's talent and evident desire to play O-Lan, MGM refused her the lead due to the anti-miscegenation Hays Code, offering her the minor role of sex worker Lotus instead, which she refused. The Bang Straws re-casts O-Lan with a Chinese actor and reconstructs The Good Earth’s innovative Special Effects.
The film World Premiered at 65th BFI London Film Festival, October 2021 (receiving a special jury commendation for the Short Film Award), Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York November 2021, where it won Best Experimental Short Film, it was also nominated for the Shirt Film Award at the 25th Internationale Kurzfilmtage, Winterthur, Switzerland, and is in competition for the London Short Film Festival, January 2022 (All BAFTA approved festivals). It will screen at FACT, Liverpool March 2022, The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery. And screenings in 2022-23 include Alchemy Film Festival, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Prague, Barcelona
On Fictional Activism: Exploring The Film Trilogy Dissolution (2019)
No full textThis chapter explores my film trilogy Dissolution (2019), which includes the films House of Women (2017), The Fruit is There to be Eaten (2018) and The Eternal Return (2019) and my filmmaking methodology "Fictional Activism". Delving into politics of representation and race, which inform my art practice, the text offers alternative strategies to filmmaking to re-engage with the image-violence of imperial legacies in cinema and the moving image. This chapter forms the research base for developing an expanded artist’s monograph on Fictional Activism (2025), for which I have applied for major funding to research and produce.
‘Feminisms’ (as a plural) is widely used today to draw attention to inequalities and to critique the status quo in limiting women’s roles/ positions/ lives/ potential. Art can offer a vision of future worlds, manifesting a desire for projecting change, playing with existing realities and conventions. Feminist Art Artivism and Activism, two sides of the same coin, arise where art approaches, develops or transforms into activism and vice versa, where activisms become artivisms. In both, art emerges in differing forms of political intervention, at both an individual, shared or collective level, apparent in actions, events, identifications and practices.
This volume wants to reveal the diversity of these practices and realities. Representing a range of critical insights, perspectives and practices from artists, activists, curators, academics and writers, it explores and reflects on the enormous variety of feminist interventions in the field of contemporary art, social processes, the public sphere and politics. In doing so, Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms touches upon broader questions of cultural difference, history, class, economic position, ecology, politics, sexual orientation, and the ways in which these intersect.
This is the first volume in the new PLURAL series. The series focuses on how the intersections between identity, power, representation and emancipation, play out in the arts and in cultural practices. The volumes in this series aim to do justice to the plurality of voices, experiences and perspectives in society and in the arts and to address the history and present and future meaning of these positions and their interrelations. PLURAL brings together new and critical insights from artists, arts professionals, activists, cultural and social researchers, journalists and theorists
Michelle Williams Gamaker Artist's Talk, and film screenings for Video Vortex XI, Video in Flux: Art, Activism & Archives, a collateral event of the Koch-Muzirisi Bienniale 2016
Full text linkAs part of the Kochi Biennale, I gave an artist's talk and presented excepts from my films House of Women (2016) and The Fruit is There to be Eaten (2017) as part of Video Vortex XI, Video in Flux: Art, Activism & Archives, 23-25 February 2017, in collaboration with Sristi School of Art, Design and Technology (Srishti Outpost, a collateral of the biennial)
This work was RSA supported by the Art Department, Goldsmith
Distant Relative Michelle Williams Gamaker
No full textDistant Relative is a reconstruction; somewhere between schoolroom, cinema, and court of law. It is a site of shared and elusive personal histories.
Since 2014, British moving image and performance artist Michelle Williams Gamaker has been developing ‘fictional activism’: the restoration of people of colour performing in 20th century British and Hollywood studio films from marginalised characters to central figures, who return in her works to challenge the fictional injustices to which they have been historically consigned.
Distant Relative marks a chapter in this exploration, with a focus on Williams Gamaker’s self-confessed obsessive journey into the life of Hollywood film star Sabu, whom she first came across as a teenager in Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1947).
Sabu was ‘discovered’ in 1936 by anthropologist filmmaker Robert Flaherty who, after gathering footage in a maharajah’s palace, brought the 12-year-old son of a mahout from Mysore to Hollywood. Flaherty cast him in Alexander Korda’s Elephant Boy (1937), which catapulted Sabu to international stardom. Sabu went on to major roles such as Abu in The Thief of Bagdad, 1940 and Mowgli in The Jungle Book, 1942. He became a household name,appearing on stamps and tea sets, endorsing cereals, starring at the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair and featuring in lifestyle magazines on both sides of the Atlantic.
Williams Gamaker is fascinated by the tension between construction and illusion in the studio system fiction machine, that offered a controlled colonial vision of the British Raj and its people, including the casting of white British actors in the roles of Indians. Sabu in effect became the go to actor for such films: the studios now had someone authentic who didn’t need to be ‘blacked up’.
Michelle Williams Gamaker’s short film, The Eternal Return, the third film in her Dissolution trilogy, premieres at Tintype. It posits a now-struggling Sabu in 1952 as he supports his family by performing – once more with a troupe of elephants – in Tom Arnold’s Christmas Circus in Haringey Arena. With the inclusion of British Pathé footage of circuses in 1950s and 60s Britain and their bizarre parading of tame beasts as ‘exotic entertainment’, the film shows the indignity Sabu felt by being similarly deployed. The film thus explores the notion of success in the absence of agency as it imagines the resentment of an individual for whom the price of prosperity was to be typecast. In Sabu’s case, this was the conflation of his background and his career that imposed a seemingly inescapable relationship with elephants; the animals recur throughout his filmography. It also highlights how, in spite of his extraordinary fame, Sabu was always the sidekick and never the lead or love interest.
Also in the exhibition is a selection of Williams Gamaker’s collection of Sabu paraphernalia: a small part of the vast array of crockery and teapots (so-called Sabuware), posters, photographs and cigarette cards still in circulation. Williams Gamaker hopes to be the world’s largest collector of these items, fully aware that this compulsion is as problematic as the objects themselves. But her archive aims to consolidate into one place an individual distributed for consumption. A large textile, a collage of press photos from the 1950 paternity case Sabu fought, casts the star in a more problematic light, further muddying the water.
In January 2018, Williams Gamaker made a pilgrimage of sorts to Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Los Angeles, the cemetery to the stars also known as the Disneyland of Death. In brown taffeta cocktail dress and stilettos, she located in the 300-acre site Sabu’s grave: no.1, Lot 482, in the Sheltering Hills plot. There she began to paint her nails gold while in private commune with the star.
Shortly afterwards she was commandeered by security and ordered to leave. Having come so far, it was at this point Williams Gamaker protested with: ‘…it’s just that I’m a distant relative’. Once uttered, these words made perfect sense
A Particular Reality (APR): Developing a Nuanced Pedagogical Methodology in Practice-Based Higher Education Courses
No full textA Particular Reality (APR): Developing a Nuanced Pedagogical Methodology in Practice-Based Higher Education Courses was developed from my conference paper on Pedagogies at Middlesex University (2022). This essay details the innovative pedagogical strategies developed within APR to support BIPoC/Intersectional students on practice-based courses to develop strategies in non-hierarchal, co-learning
Brown Queers (2017) at Scottish Queer Film Festival: SQIFF Shorts: Regen(d)eration
No full textSQIFF and Hidden Door collaborate to bring you programme of shorts exploring queer notions of rebirth to consider how we (re)construct, navigate and negotiate our queer identities.
Programme:
Beyond the Mirror's Gaze - Iris Moore
Man - Maja Borg
Versions - Matthew Kennedy
Brown Queers - Michelle Williams Gamaker
Brown Queers developed out of a need to create a social document of current modes of identity through multiple personas and styles. The protagonists of Brown Queers explore such modes through their conscious decision to be gender fluid and non-binary. For the past eight months, I have been following Krishna Istha, Katy Jalili and Natasha Lall, all individuals who identify as queer and brown. Beyond this, complexities related to nationality, race, gender and sexuality play out through their bodies and in the different contexts in which they live and work: the film thus acts as a record of these individuals in contemporary Britain. Brown Queers poses questions that come out of the layered states of being that embody fluidity, “browness” and “queerness”.
I have authored the work, but it is very much a conversation about presenting and framing the individual. During shoots, an idea is posed and the result is a docu-fiction, located between the verité of Jean Rouch’s Chronique d'un été [Chronicle of a Summer] (1961) and the illusion of realism in highly stylised films such as Lachapelle’s Rize (2005). Thus far, locations have been varied, following each subject at home, in tattoo parlours, in clubs or performing on stage. The plan is to “voice” thoughts so that their bodies speak, rather than via direct conversation to camera, in order to offer a multiplicity of voices, a plural body, where three individuals contribute to a wider monologue that speaks for many experiencing the unknown territory of identity as identities.
Just as Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin question whether or not it is possible to act sincerely in front of a camera. I wish to complicate the framing of the individual through thought, as monologues toy with the conscious fictionalising of self through costume, make-up and the body politic.
The sequence in the teaser trailer was shot at Central London bar Sketch, a space very much part of the establishment and thus embodying privilege. I wanted the brown queers to be visible within the stylised pink décor, thereby intentionally playing with the stereotypically gendered colour scheme for girls or women. Under the guidance of expert trans hair and make-up beauty stylist Umber Ghauri, Krishna, Katy and Natasha transform into their chosen identities against the tableaux-vivant of Sketch’s main dining room.
As a person of colour and a queer filmmaker, the significance of this project is key to my work both personally and politically
Thieves (2023)
No full textWilliams Gamaker draws on and celebrates the classic movies she watched growing up. Taking inspiration from early Hollywood and British cinema, Thieves is a fantasy adventure retelling of The Thief of Bagdad. The Thief of Bagdad is a silent, black and white film from 1924, which was remade in colour in 1940.
Williams Gamaker reimagines the marginalised characters as claiming leading roles in her film, played in the originals by Chinese-American actor Anna May Wong and Indian-born American actor Sabu. Now, both characters reclaim the story as their own, challenging the racial discrimination of the film industry. Told as a movie within a movie, in Thieves Anna May Wong is found on set by Sabu, but there is something wrong: she is in black-and-white while everything else is in Technicolor, and both find themselves trapped in their screen-images. Both must navigate the structural violence on set (in this case, the casting of white actors to replace actors of colour) by joining forces to overthrow the set and those in charge
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