Charlotte Prodger wins Turner Prize for film works on gender identity
Glasgow-based artist Charlotte Prodger has said she felt “quite overwhelmed” on wining the 2018 Turner Prize for film work examining landscapes and gender identity.
The artist takes home the £25,000 prize for her films, which made use of clips shot on her iphone overlaid with musing reflections on subjects surrounding queer identity.
Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie presented the award at a ceremony held at Tate Britain in London.
Prodger, 44, who studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Glasgow School of Art, has been hailed for her work BRIDGIT, which was shot using her phone, and for the multi-format film Stoneymollan Trail.
The exhibit impressed prize judges for the way it explores “lived experience as mediated through technologies and histories”.
Following her nomination, Prodger told the Tate: “I was thinking about the importance of self-determination to histories of queer struggle. This is an encroachment on queer spaces, which is in part due to the commodification of queer aesthetic.”
Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, said: “It’s a political Turner Prize. I think it’s inevitable that there will be interest in artwork that says things in a very timely way.
“In terms of the winner, it’s one that seems to make a lot of points for a younger generation. It deals with gender as unfixed, as something fluid, as something not always conforming to society’s norms.”
Tate said: “The jury admired the painterly quality BRIDGIT and the attention it paid to art history. The work meanders through disparate associations ranging from JD Sports and standing stones to 1970s lesbian separatism and Jimi Hendrix’s sound recordist.”
Three other artists were on the shortlist: Forensic Architecture, a collective; Bangladeshi-british artist Naeem Mohaiemen and New Zealand artist Luke Willis Thompson.
Since 1996, six artists associated with Glasgow – Douglas Gordon, Martin Creed, Simon Starling, Richard Wright, Susan Philipsz and Martin Boyce – have won the Turner.