The Lives of Artists – Michelle Williams Gamaker: Our Mountains Are Painted on Glass at the Bluecoat

The Bluecoat continues its Lives of Artists season with a new set of exhibitions taking over the galleries, the largest of which is Michelle Williams Gamaker: Our Mountains are Painted on Glass.

The exhibition is centred around the work Thieves, a retelling of 1924 silent, black and white film The Thief of Bagdad, remade in colour in 1940. The British-Sri Lankan artist utilises speculative narrative to reimagine the film’s central characters and address themes of race, identity and representation.

Thieves takes the original film’s marginalised characters and places them at the centre of the narrative. Originally played by Chinese-American actor Anna May Wong and Indian-born American actor Sabu, the pair set out to challenge the racial discrimination rife within the film industry. The story is structured as a film within a film: Anna May Wong is found on set by Sabu but she is in black and white while everything else is in Technicolor and the pair realise they’re trapped within their screen-images. It soon transpires that the challenge is to confront the discrimination on set which takes the form of preference for casting white actors in place of actors of colour.

Collaboration is key in the artist’s practice: Anna May Wong is played by Dahong Hongxuan Wang, an artist who has previously played the role in several of Williams Gamaker’s works (and who is also exhibiting her new film Role Models in the Bluecoat at the same time in Gallery 1). 

Williams Gamaker is best known for her work on the idea of ‘fictional activism’ – the centring of marginalised characters of colour in classic cinema narratives. She describes Thieves as the first film to become ‘fictional revenge’ as a further development of the concept. The artist emphasises that she deeply loves the cinema classics but cannot overlook the blatant prejudice and injustices that took place and remain so visible today. By hijacking the casting process, she rewrites the stories in order to give voices to the actors in question.

Our Mountains are Painted on Glass is an illuminating exhibition yet the messages are not communicated in a didactic way. Instead, viewers can enjoy a beautifully produced film, get lost in the story and the captivating visuals while also learning more about its preparation.