Secession

Charlie Prodger (b.1974) is a Scottish artist working with moving image, photography, sculpture and drawing. She won the 2018 Turner Prize and represented Scotland at the 2019 Venice Biennale. She is currently a 2023–24 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Broadly, Prodger’s work orbits histories - from the weight of deep geological time to more contingent forms of narrative such as anecdote and oral history. Through the prism of queer subjectivity, her work explores intertwined relations between the body, landscape, language, technology and time.

The Offering Formula includes two rooms of photographs, sculptural wall-based works, and a new series of meticulously rendered drawings. These still lives continue Prodger’s interest in geology in relation to time and identity, taxonomy, versions, mises-en-abymes, and the erotics of fragmentation. Having worked with reproductive technologies for over thirty years, Prodger has inherently moved through many discontinued formats, and the migration of data from one format to another has inherently become part of her formal language. She is fascinated by processes of conservation and preservation, whereby materials and time, permanence and entropy, are held in perpetual balance.

In the third room, Prodger exhibits in its entirety for the first time her film trilogy Stoneymollan Trail (2015), BRIDGIT (2016), and SaF05 (2019), in which she seeks to counter linear history and its imperative of progress by producing a matrix of contingent, transhistorical queer relations. This autobiographical cycle traces the accumulation of affinities, desires and losses that form a self as it moves forward in time.

Coinciding with the exhibition, Secession is publishing a book in which London-based associate professor of literature and visual culture Sarah Hayden offers a detailed analysis of the significance of the voice in Prodger’s videos.

Curated by Bettina Spörr