"Williams 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 charcters 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." South London Gallery, 2023
www.southlondongallery.org/exhibitions/michelle-williams-gamaker/
www.southlondongallery.org/exhibitions/michelle-williams-gamaker/
Thieves was commissioned by Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN) with funding from Arts Council England, and co-commissioned with the South London Gallery (SLG) and Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA). Additional support from: National Lottery through Arts Council England; The Foundation Foundation; and The British Academy and the Wolfson Foundation. The film was produced by FLAMIN and Keep Rolling Studios. The show tours to Bluecoat, Liverpool in May, 2024 where it is currently on exhibition.
Thieves is shown alongside two film installations produced by the artist, The Bang Straws (2021) and The Eternal Return (2019), both part of the artist’s Fictional Activism trilogy at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) till 24th March 2024.