The queen of ‘fictional activism’, Michelle Williams Gamaker’s first Scottish show is a gift of revisionist cinephilia. A Sri Lankan-Brit from the Derek Jarman school of cinematic mischief, Gamaker revisits the not-so-glorious age of casting discrimination in Hollywood and beyond, through two of its most famous victims, Anna May Wong (Shanghai Express) and Sabu (The Jungle Book). 

Gamaker’s 2021 short ‘The Bang Straws’ reimagines the racism around the pre-production of 1937 film The Good Earth which resulted in American-German actress Luise Rainer winning the lead role of Chinese farmer’s wife O-Lan and going ‘yellowface’. Wong lobbied hard for the role but was passed over. ‘The Bang Straws’ offers an alternative outcome to this sorry tale. In the room with this film are some intriguing collaborations with other artists that pertain to the geographies, geologies and socio-eccentricities of The Good Earth. 

Deeper in, things open up with more exquisite collages, installations, papier mâché thrones, vitrines and plywood time machines. This room is the segue to start a reflection on the curious 1940 colour remake of The Thief Of Baghdad, a byword for a very peculiar form of cultural and racist dysphoria. Gamaker’s most recent film, ‘Thieves’ (the first in her ‘fictional revenge’ series), has a room to itself and is quite simply a masterwork of impish glee that puts Sabu, Wong and their mirrored need for agency front, centre and victorious. 

The final room features the saddest moment. ‘The Eternal Return’ is Gamaker’s 2019 retelling of Sabu’s depressing winter of 1952, when he tried to support his family by appearing with elephants again in cross-dressing impresario Tom Arnold’s Christmas circus at Harringay Arena. Just over a decade later, Sabu was dead at 40, his potential appropriated. Co-commissioned with South London Gallery, Our Mountains Are Painted On Glass is a remarkable exhibition. 

Michelle Williams Gamaker: Our Mountains Are Painted On Glass, Dundee Contemporary Arts, until Sunday 24 March.