Michelle Williams Gamaker: Recasting History in Strange Evidence

02/06/2025

In her latest exhibition, Strange Evidence, British–Sri Lankan artist Michelle Williams Gamaker continues her powerful interrogation of cinematic history, race, and representation. Presented at Matt’s Gallery in London, this feature-length film and accompanying installation form the final chapter of her trilogy Critical Affection, a body of work that challenges the politics of casting, visibility, and historical erasure.

At the center of Strange Evidence is the figure of Merle Oberon—an Anglo-Indian Hollywood star from cinema’s Golden Age who spent her career hiding her heritage to pass as white. Through meticulously crafted fictional reconstructions, Williams Gamaker imagines Oberon’s interior world: a woman caught between fame and denial, performance and identity. The film does not offer a simple biopic but a deeply psychological lens, capturing the emotional toll of racial passing and the silent violence of Hollywood’s whitening gaze.

The exhibition’s title, Strange Evidence, evokes both legal inquiry and cinematic drama. Evidence of what? And for whom? The gallery space becomes an atmospheric site of questioning, filled with fragments: props, photographs, and cinematic ephemera. These elements echo the fragmented identity Oberon was forced to construct—and the historical absences Williams Gamaker seeks to repair.

This work builds on Williams Gamaker’s practice of “fictional activism,” where speculative narratives are used to restore agency to marginalized characters and actors. As in her previous films, Thieves and The Bang Straws, she writes back into history with tenderness and precision, casting brown protagonists in roles from which they were historically excluded. Her work is not simply revisionist—it is reparative.

Strange Evidence is both visually rich and intellectually rigorous. It invites viewers to reflect on the cost of invisibility, the politics of appearance, and the ways we inherit, perform, and suppress identity. Through the reanimation of one woman’s story, Michelle Williams Gamaker asks us to consider how many others remain unseen in the margins of film history—and how art can begin to bring them into focus.