Michelle Williams Gamaker: Our Mountains Are Painted on Glass at Dundee Contemporary Arts showcases an artist known for her inventive film-making and screenwriting. British-Sri Lankan artist Michelle Williams Gamaker’s practice explores race, identity, the power of storytelling and her love of classic movies.

In her new film work, Thieves, a fantasy adventure retelling of The Thief of Baghdad, a silent black and white film from 1924 which was remade in colour in 1940, Williams Gamaker reimagines the marginalised characters, played in the originals by Chinese-American actor Anna May Wong and Indian-born American actor Sabu, in leading roles. 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.