Research
2013 Madame B Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker Genre: Drama, Multi-lingual with English subtitles The project explores the unspeakable but tenacious remnants of romantic sensibility that still hold back women today, combined with the emotional tentacles of capitalism that bring families to bankruptcy. Inspired by Flaubert’s 1856 masterpiece Madame Bovary, we examine the unspoken cultural politics of the cultivation of craving. In this project, we aim to highlight what contemporary culture still silences. The work attempts to show how Flaubert was in many ways a post-modernist and feminist. It explores the way dominant ideologies – specifically capitalism and its association with emotions, and romantic love with its commercial aspects – are still rampant after 150 years. The work consists of two parts, an immersive 19-screen video installation and a feature-length film for cinema. |
2006-12
Immersion and Reciprocity: Art Experience in Live Space PhD in Fine Art (Goldsmiths College, University of London) The thesis selects artists who reflexively questioned their role by utilising trans-disciplinary techniques such as psychotherapy and social anthropology to distribute authorship. Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica and Paul Thek are explored in-depth alongside contemporary artists: Aernout Mik, Eija-Liisa Ahtila and Marcus Coates. This process involved collaboration with fellow artists, art spectators and in some cases people seeking treatment, and in more direct terms expressed the potential for art to escape the expectations of market forces. The selected artists' works persistently reinforced their antithetical message to the art world and meant they operated as marginalised figures during their lifetime. The thesis looks at the social framework of their practice, its therapeutic potential and its contemporary relevance. |
2010 The Space In-Between 2 channels | 10 mins | HDV | colour | audio | French, subtitles English The performative power of space between analyst and patient lies at the heart of Françoise Davoine’s social approach to psychoanalysis; she attempts to make the theory and practice less individualistic and do justice to psychoanalysis as a profoundly social science. The practice of this conception is what makes the psychoanalytic space itself a medium, as we attempt to show with the installation. Space is taken to be performative in the sense of speech act theory – meaning that the sign, here, the space itself, has an effect on its recipient. |
Anachronisms/Anachronismos
3 channels |10 mins | HDV | colour | various languages, subtitles English and Spanish This installation combines images from the feature film with details from paintings of the 17th Century Dutch and Flemish collection of the Städel Museum, Frankfurt (exhibited at the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum). Anachronism is an historical error; it means going against chronology. Hence, anachronism is heresy. For chronology is sacred in the study of art. In our video installation we have tried to explore how a strengthening of anachronism brings us closer to these paintings, not as a heritage from the past but as partners in a discussion of what matters in contemporary culture. The Mère Folle project lends itself particularly well to demonstrate this, as it is entirely based on the anachronistic encounters between the Fools and the Mad, as well as different times from the twentieth century. |
2008-11
The Mère Folle project 140’ | HDV | colour | sound | multi-lingual with English subtitles A feature film based on the 1998 book of the same name by French psychoanalyst Françoise Davoine, Mère Folle stages a confrontation between the analyst and her patients, told as a conflict between the contemporary world and medieval fools. In so doing, the work offers a positive representation of mad (psychotic) people and how both “mad” and “sane” people learn from one another. Utilising an out-of-the-box integration of fiction, documentary and theory, Mère Folle is a unique and enthralling journey into the minds of the mad and those designated to cure them. Read more at Cinema Suitcase or visit the film’s official website. |
2009
MFA Art Practice Catalogue 2009 Goldsmiths College, London The MFA class of 2009 invited six art professionals, all of whom have contributed to our educational experience at Goldsmiths, to take part in an email conversation. The selected group were sent three questions over a period of 2 weeks and asked to respond via <REPLY ALL> email to the rest of the group. The dialogue took place in March 2009 between: Maria Fusco (writer, director of Art Writing, Goldsmiths) Ryan Gander (artist, curator) Chris Hammond (curator, director of MOT International London), Hayley Newman (artist, writer, Adrian Rifkin – writer, professor of Art Writing / Art, Goldsmiths, Michelle Williams Gamaker (artist, writer). |
Performativity Symposium
Goldsmiths College, London JILLIAN PEÑA | LIA CHAVEZ | MICHELLE WILLIAMS | SUSANA MENDES SILVA | VÉRONIQUE CHANCE more... |
Research trip to Brazil
São Paolo, Rio de Janiero and Belo Horizonte I met Julia Kouneski during a research trip to Brazil in April 2009. We found that our research overlapped in several areas, so we decided to pool our resources and collaborate through research interviews (with Brazilian theorist Suely Rolnik, occupational therapists Dr Beth Lima, Dr Edith Seligman Silva and Danielle Okuma and with a Mind Body Centering specialist Adriana Almeida Pees). As well as the interviews, which followed a traditionally academic format, we also worked for one week in São Paolo, Brazil on a series of live experiments, allowing our bodies to be actively involved in the research process. |
Psychoanalysis and Cinema
Miss B’s Salon Salon blog: http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/408627 with Andrea Sabbadini and Michelle Williams. Guest curated by Nicole Bachmann, E:VENT, London more... |
Bordercrossings; Art/Anthropology Exchange
How Can I Know Unless You Let Me Join You? , Goldsmiths College London Anthropology and contemporary art share an increasing number of concerns, but this overlap rarely develops into an open and active exchange of ideas (see Schneider & Wright Contemporary Art and Anthropology 2006). Border Crossings is about opening up such a dialogue that can transform this mutual attraction into a more active engagement. By connecting the work being done in the Visual Arts department with that of the Centre for Visual Anthropology, it will showcase doctoral work by current students at Goldsmiths. Michelle Williams (MA Visual Anthropology graduate and now PhD student in Visual Arts), Katrina Crear (PhD student in Anthropology and working at White Cube gallery) both of whom are actively working and researching work in the area of overlap between art and anthropology. Veronica Cordeiro is an artist and graduate of the MA Visual Anthropology. The session will consider the ways in which ‘ethnography’ has been embraced by many contemporary artists and put to use with a political intent. It could be argued that this appropriation operates at a deeper level than the ‘ethnographic turn’ identified by Hal Foster: artists now are not only interested in the ‘politics of representation’, but also in what ethnography can help them say about the politics of exchange and appropriation in the contemporary world. The workshop is chaired by Dr Chris Wright and Dr Roger Sansi. |
2008
2:Move Migratory Aesthetics, Belfast, Ireland Panel guest, curated by Mieke Bal and Miguel A. Hernández-Navarro Bringing together the work of international artists from different generations and origins, 2MOVE explores the connections between video, mobility, migratory culture and our contemporary world. Today, the encounter with the traces of migration gives way to a plurality of sensory experiences which both transform and modify our everyday life., experiences that are themselves ‘aesthetic’. 2MOVE reflects about different ways to visually articulate some aspects of what we can call our contemporary ‘migratory culture’: the cut, or severance, between mobility and sedentariness, as embodied in the disagreement between the dubious visibility of immigrants in the West and the absence of those they have left behind; the ordinary, banal and sometimes abject ‘look’ and the monotonous everyday; the hetero-temporality of a world that likes to think in progression; the surface or ‘skin’ that prevents us from seeing, as both racism and the opaqueness of the seemingly transparent medium of video elaborate together… |
February 2009, February 2008
GAGA (2009)/ Reading the Artist (2008) Events Day, MFA Art Practice Year 1, Goldsmiths, London Taken from a teaching concept at Middlesex University (Quicksilver Place) Events Day starts with the premise to encourage all art students to find elements of performance in their making process. Experimentation and risk taking and using unfamiliar spaces to present work are key to the process. In 2008 and 2009 I initiated the concept and the MFA year groups organised and structured the itinerary. It is now in it’s third year at Goldsmiths. more... 
2007 Open Studio: Paul Johnson Artist in residence at the Camden Arts Centre Paul Johnson talks about his practice and ideas of spiritualism and cult in art with artist Michelle Williams. Selected excerpts of interview printed in Camden Arts Centre File Note #27 Paul Johnson: Stranger’s Refuge November 2007 |
Celestial Telegraph
A newspaper project - a growing collection of artist's contributions on spirituality and communication - The first working draft was exhibited at The Camden Arts Centre as part of Dreaming Confusion, November 7th 2009. The Celestial Telegraph will appear on this website in the future. |
Routemaster General: LONDON
Film screening, Gallery 176, London A screening that takes a metaphorical tour through North West London, the City, the East End and South East London. Featuring: Michelle Williams [Girl in Grass, 2004], Patrick Keiller [Stonebridge Park, 1981], Steve Klee [Extractions position 4 Grunwick film processing factory, Willesden, London Nov 7th 1977, 2007], Alex Schady [Encounter, 2008], Linda Aloyisus [Monument Street, 2002], Mikko Cannini [Roundabout, 2007], Lois Rowe [Mannerism to Mind, 2008], William Raban [A13, 1994], Arthur Elton & E.H.Anstey [Housing Problems, 1935], John Smith [Blight, 1994], Jefford Horrigan [Mile End] |
2003-current
Cinema Suitcase Cinema Suitcase is an international group of filmmakers pursuing projects of experimental social documentary. Coming from a diversity of fields in the visual arts, they seek to facilitate the self-narration of their subjects, always encountered on the basis of a great intimacy, rather than constructing their stories for them. This approach enhances the performative quality of filmmaking as a collective process. Cinema Suitcase founding members: Mieke Bal, Zen Marie, Thomas Sykora, Gary Ward & Michelle Williams Gamaker. |