London, Dec 5 (IANS) Glasgow-based British artist Charlotte Prodger has won the prestigious Turner Prize for 2018, awarded for “an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the preceding year”.
Forty four-year-old Prodger, who works with moving image, printed image, sculpture and writing, was nominated for the prize for her solo exhibition “BRIDGIT/Stoneymollan Trail” at Bergen Kunsthall (2017) comprising two single-channel videos, Tate Gallery said on Tuesday.
Prodger’s work explores issues surrounding queer identity, landscape, language, technology and time.
Her video work “BRIDGIT” is titled after an eponymous Neolithic deity, and was shot entirely on Prodger’s iPhone, which she approaches as a prosthesis or extension of the nervous system, intimately connected to time, social interaction and work, Tate said.
About her work, the former student of Goldsmiths, London and The Glasgow School of Art, says that she likes that “systems of the body enmeshed with the camera”.
“Your fingers get in the shot, they’re fleshy, they’re right here when they’re on the screen and you can see the blood inside your finger if you cover the tiny lens. You touch that and rub the screen to alter the exposure…and if you try and do a static shot, you see your body breathing.”
“For my voiceovers, I often asked friends to read out my own personal diaristic content; people I feel an affinity with…fragments of these histories are enfolded into me, the histories and language of older queer figures like Samuel Delaney and Sandy Stone,” she said.
The Turner Prize, being given since 1984, is named after 19th-century English artist J.M.W. Turner and gives out £40,000 as a monetary accompaniment.
The 2018 jury consisted of art critic and International Editor at ArtReview Oliver Basciano, Kunsthalle Basel Director Elena Filipovic, Executive Director of Holt-Smithson Foundation Lisa Le Feuvre, and novelist and writer Tom McCarthy. The jury was chaired by Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain.
–IANS
sj/nir