Michelle Williams Gamaker

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 films.

Such performers here migrate 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 new 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 in Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1947).

In her first solo-show at Tintype, Michelle Williams Gamaker presents Distant Relative as a reconstruction; somewhere between schoolroom, cinema, and court of law. It is a site of shared and elusive personal histories.

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 [elephant driver] 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.

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.

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’.

Supported by The Elephant Trust and a Goldsmiths Research Support

Award.

Michelle Williams Gamaker lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions and screenings include, As Seen on Screen, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; All About You (with Julia Kouneski) The Koppel Project Hive; Women Power Protest, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; Essex Road 5, Tintype, 2019; 35th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur; Solitary Pleasures, Freud Museum London; Transmediale Festival: Face Value, Berlin; Library Interventions: Moving Knowledge, Blenheim Walk Gallery; Living Beyond Limits Queeratorial Project and History Repeats Itself, MIMA, Middlesbrough; BFI: Flare!; BFI 62nd London Film Festival 2018; Emma and Edvard, Love in the Time of Loneliness (with Mieke Bal) Munch Museet, Norway; Concrete Jungle, Annka Kultys Gallery, London; The World Made New, Pi Projects, London; Work Work, Tintype, London, 2017; The Making, The Agency, London, 2015.