Film created in Scotland on an iphone a highlight of Turner Prize nominees show
A half-hour film shot around Scotland on an iphone has gone on display as part of the annual showcase of contenders for the coveted Turner Prize.
It has opened at Tate Britain in London ahead of the winning being decided at a gala ceremony in December.
Glasgow artist Charlotte Prodger, 44, who has been tipped as the favourite for the £25,000 award, made her work on her own iphone at home and in at various locations in the countryside around Scotland.
She studied at Goldsmiths College in London before she completed a masters at Glasgow School of Art.
All four contenders, who are said to tackle “pressing political and humanitarian issues of today”, have submitted films for the exhibition, which runs from today until 6 January.
Academic group Forensic Architecture, an international research agency that uses video, photographs, scale models and text to investigate allegations of state and corporate violence, has documented police attempts to clear a Bedouin village in southern Israel. Naeem Mohaiemen has made a film about a man who spends a decade living alone in an abandoned airport. And Luke Willis Thompson’s entry includes a silent film study of Diamond Reynolds, who livestreamed video of the night when her partner Philando Castile was shot dead by a US police officer in 2016.
Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, said: “The artists shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize are tackling some of today’s most important issues, from queer identity, human rights abuses and police brutality to post-colo-
nial migration and the legacy of liberation movements. For the first time, all the shortlisted artists work with the moving image and it’s thrilling to see how wide a range of techniques and styles they use.”
Bournemouth-born Prodger, who works with moving and printed images, as well as sculpture and writing, tackles issues surrounding queer identity, landscape, language, technology and time.
The work featured in the exhibition was shot entirely on an iphone, which the artist
is said to have seen as a prosthesis or extension of the nervous system, intimately connected to time, social interaction and work. The piece is named Bridgit “after the eponymous Neolithic deity whose name has had multiple iterations across different geographical locations and points in history”.
Since 1996, six artists associated with Glasgow – Douglas Gordon, Martin Creed, Simon Starling, Richard Wright, Susan Philipsz and Martin Boyce – have won the Turner
Prize and many GSA graduateshavebeennominatedover the years, including Christine Borland, Jim Lambie, Nathan Coley, Cathy Wilkes, Lucy Skaer, Karla Black, David Shrigley, Ciara Phillips and Tris Vonna-michell.
The city’s transformation into an internationallyrenowned centre for the visual arts has become known as the “Glasgow miracle”, a phrase first used by German curator Hans Ulrich Obrist.