Michelle Williams Gamaker
The Ascent
13th July - 3rd August
The Ascent is a new installation continuing Michelle Williams Gamaker’s interest in the politics of performance for film stars of colour. Shredded cinema posters form a (Technicolor) shimmering surface for British and Hollywood Film Star Merle Oberon to perform her screen test amid a mountainous mound in the gallery.
Oberon (2023) was first commissioned by BFI, as part of their landmark Powell and Pressburger exhibition, exploring the early genesis of their film The Red Shoes (1948). The film is a response to a photographic series of actor Merle Oberon in the BFI’s collection, taken at around the time that Film Producer Alexander Korda was developing the script for The Red Shoes. Make-up, lighting and cosmetic surgery masked the physical trauma of a car accident in 1937, in addition to Oberon’s complex relationship with her visual identity whereby she hid her Anglo-South Asian heritage and passed as white until her death in 1979. These techniques also lightened her skin on camera.
Written as a love letter from Korda to Oberon to help her secure The Red Shoes lead, (the role eventually went to Moira Shearer). Korda speaks the lines of Konstantin – an early version of ballet impresario Boris Lermontov – during a fictional make-up test. A continuation of Williams Gamaker’s Fictional Activism series, Oberon returns to the space of casting/screen tests. This functions as a political tool to interrogate the moment in which key decisions about representation (and ultimately who can perform a story). The film also explores the relationships that extend behind the camera to the individuals (mostly men) who held Oberon’s career and her image in their power.
Michelle Williams Gamaker is a London-based artist filmmaker (who is an unashamed cinephile) focused on Critical Affection; a return to British and Hollywood mid-20th Century films that she loved as a teenager by revisiting the embedded structural racism, casting discrimination and imperial storytelling within entertainment’s Fiction Machine. She is joint winner of Film London’s Jarman Award (2020) and winner of Aethetica’s Short Film Festival’s Best Experimental Film, 2021 and 2023. Her major institutional solo, Our Mountains are Painted on Glass premiered Thieves (2023) and recently toured to South London Gallery, Dundee Contemporary Arts and Bluecoat, Liverpool. Williams Gamaker is Reader in BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is currently a British Academy Wolfson Fellow.