Charlie Prodger Double Bill: BRIDGIT and SaF05

Join us for a screening of two films by artist Charlie Prodger. Through the prism of queer subjectivity, Charlie Prodger’s work explores intertwined relationships between the body, landscape, language and technology. This double-bill comprises BRIDGIT (2016) and SaF05 (2019); the penultimate and final in Prodger’s trilogy of films that began in 2015 with Stoneymollan Trail. This autobiographical cycle traces the accumulation of affinities, desires and losses that form a self as it moves forward in time. Prodger is a 2023-24 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Please join us for a public post-screening reception on the CCVA terrace.

This event is co-presented by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the Film Study Center at Harvard University, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

BRIDGIT, 2016

32 mins

BRIDGIT, for which Prodger won the 2018 Turner Prize, takes its title from the eponymous Neolithic deity whose name has numerous iterations depending on life stage, locality and point in history. Exploring the shifting temporal interrelations of name, body, and landscape, BRIDGIT focuses on female attachments—a process of identification that includes friends, shape-shifting deities, and other figures of influence. A flash drive used in the production of the film is named Turiya, a moniker of musician Alice Coltrane, and Prodger quotes virtual systems theorist and transgender studies pioneer Sandy Stone, citing Stone’s various names (e.g. Sandy Stone, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Allucquere Rosanne “Sandy” Stone) as extended embodiments spanning time and space. BRIDGIT was shot entirely on Prodger’s phone, which she approaches as a prosthesis or extension of the nervous system—one which also provides an intimate connection to global social interaction and work. Body and device become extensions of each other, and the work becomes a unified meditation on shifting subjectivity.

SaF05, 2019

39 mins

SaF05, with which Prodger represented Scotland at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, draws on archival, scientific and diaristic sources and combines footage from a number of geographical locations (the Scottish Highlands, the Great Basin Desert, the Okavango Delta and the Ionian Islands). SaF05 is named after a maned lioness that figures in the work as a cipher for queer attachment and desire. This animal was the last of several maned lionesses documented in the Okavango Delta, known to Prodger only through a database of behaviours and camera-trap footage logged by conservationists. Here, she uses film industry cameras, a smartphone, and a flying drone—each employed for their inherent material properties. The hum of the drone is taken up as a sonic motif that transmutates throughout the film as a bagpipe, a cicada mating call, a saxophone, and a battery alarm - syncopated equivalences between animal and human, instrument and machine. Concurrently, Prodger’s voiceover traces a chronology of intimate gestures and interpersonal connections from pubescence to the present, inscribed with wider political structures of sovereignty, land use and territory. SaF05 is a meditation on relations, however tangible, that expand and diffuse conceptions of intimacy, family, sexuality and kinship.

Charlie Prodger (b. 1974, United Kingdom) is a Glasgow-based artist working with moving image, writing, sculpture, and drawing. She was the winner of the 2018 Turner Prize and represented Scotland at the 2019 Venice Biennale. She received the 2014 Margaret Tait Award, the 2017 Paul Hamlyn Award and is a Macdowell Fellow. Prodger is currrently a 2023–24 fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a fellow at the Harvard Film Study Center.

Prodger’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at Secession, Vienna; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunst Museum Winterthur; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Wesleyan University Zlkha Gallery; The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago; Yale Center for British Art; Bunder Kunstmuseum, Chur; Studio Voltaire, London; Tate Britain, London; SculptureCenter, New York; Bergen Kunsthall; Kunstverein Dusseldorf; British Art Show 8; Spike Island, Bristol; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Kunsthalle Frieburg and Artists Space, New York. Her films have been screened at numerous film festivals, including London Film Festival, Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, Courtisane festival, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, New York Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, Lux Biennial of Moving Images, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Seoul International New Media Festival and Toronto International Film Festival. 

Prodger’s writing has been published in Frieze, F.R.DAVID, 2HB, The Happy Hypocrite, Intertitles: An Anthology at the Intersection of Writing and Visual Art and What Artists Wear by Charlie Porter.  She teaches at De Ateliers in Amsterdam and at Zurich University of the Arts. She is represented by Hollybush Gardens, London and Kendall Koppe, Glasgow.