Charlotte Prodger works with moving image, printed image, sculpture and writing. She was the winner of the 2018 Turner Prize for her solo exhibition, BRIDGIT/Stoneymollan Trail at Bergen Kunsthall (2017) comprising two single-channel videos. Moving image has been at the core of Prodger’s work for two decades. Its ever-evolving formats are inextricably bound to the autobiographical content of her work. She has mined the material properties of numerous moving image formats, not just because they inherently get replaced over time, but because she is fascinated by their formal parameters and socio-political histories; the sticky relationship between form and content. Her work explores issues surrounding queer identity, landscape, language, technology and time.
Handclap/Punchhole, 2011, 9’46”
Handclap/Punchhole takes its name from two technical actions used in the film industry to synch recorded sound with celluloid. Conversely, Prodger displaces of sound and image here – to the point where they play out in inverse relation to the other: image is only present when sound is not, and vice versa. The installation includes a spoken word audio tape playing on a Sharp GF 767. Considered the holy grail of boomboxes, it was designed in 1982 to drown out all other boomboxes on the street. Here, it is competing with the mechanical clatter of silent images traveling through the film projector. While the film documents a small intervention – a queer countercultural body in an historical environment which has been repositioned into a mainstream tourist attraction – the tape on the boombox plays a collection of cross-pollinating oral histories describing the increasing obsolescence of analogue cinema simultaneously with the obliteration of gay cruising spaces: queer subjectivity brushing up against the limits of reproductive technology.