BRIDGIT, ADULTERESS

This screening brings together two recent works by Glasgow-based artists Jamie Crewe and Charlotte Prodger, Adulteress (2017) and BRIDGIT (2016) respectively, based in queerness, rurality, communality, care, and time. The screening is accompanied by a new publication designed by the artists, titled BRIDGIT, ADULTERESS, containing transcripts of each video and new elements tracing their shared sympathies.

Adulteress stages a sequence described in French writer Rachilde’s Monsieur Venus: a Materialist Novel (1884). This sequence sees the submissive, feminine Jacques Silvert slip away from Raoule Silvert (formerly de Vénérande), his domineering, masculine wife, to walk the streets in a black velvet dress and attempt to seduce a ​‘real man’. In Rachilde’s chapter (which can be read on-screen across the duration of Adulteress) this transgression is experienced from the point of view of Raoule, who is wild with jealousy. The moving image, however, focuses on Jacques, who enters a barn in Glasgow full of friends and well-wishers, where he meets his sister, Marie, who does his make-up and hair and dresses him in a long black dress. Due to differences in pace and setting; image and text are dislocated in Adulteress, except for a few moments of strange alignment; in the moments of most intense anticipation for the character of Jacques, the deadly consequences of his adventure can already be read on screen. Themes of domination, historical dislocation, and gendered doom emerge, and just at the edge of them, a sense of escape or elusion.

Adulteress was originally displayed as part of Crewe’s solo exhibition Female Executioner at Gasworks, London, in early 2017, and was commissioned by Gasworks through the Freelands Artist Programme.

BRIDGIT takes its title from the eponymous Neolithic deity whose name has numerous iterations depending on life stage, locality and point in history. Shifting interrelations of language, body, technology and landscape are explored through the work’s narratives where “… the force of time is not just a contingent characteristic of living, but is the dynamic impetus that enables life to become, to always be in the process of becoming, something other than it was” (Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Duke University Press, 2005).

BRIDGIT focuses on female attachments – a process of identification that includes friends, shape-shifting deities and other figures of influence. At one point in the video, the camera pans across Prodger’s laptop on which a mountain landscape serves as desktop image. A flash drive icon comes into view, named by the artist after a set of recordings made by musician Alice Coltrane under the moniker ​‘Turiya’. Later, while quoting virtual systems theorist and pioneer of transgender studies Sandy Stone, Prodger cites Stone’s different names (Sandy Stone, Allucquére Rosanne Stone, Allucquére Rosanne ​“Sandy” Stone) as extended embodiments spanning time and space.

Shot entirely on Prodger’s iPhone (which she approaches as a prosthesis or extension of the nervous system), BRIDGIT is based in multiple registers of bodily time: the arc of her own life; the period of a year she took to make the piece; the real time of industrial and civic transportation; the clockwork rhythm of the medical institution; the temporality of socio-political movements bridging generations, and the vast time of prehistory.

BRIDGIT was supported by Creative Scotland. It was produced for Prodger’s solo show at Hollybush Gardens, London in 2016 and has subsequently been exhibited at Sculpture Center, New York and Kunsthall Bergen.

Programme:

Jamie Crewe, Adulteress, 2017. Video, 22 min.Charlotte Prodger, BRIDGIT, 2016. Video, 32 min.

This screening is part of GFT’s Crossing the Line strand and is supported by Film Hub Scotland, part of the BFI’s Film Audience Network.

Limited capacity, advance booking recommended.

Jamie Crewe lives and works in Glasgow. They have presented two solo exhibitions, Female Executioner, Gasworks, London (2017) and But what was most awful was a girl who was singing, Transmission, Glasgow (2016). They have recently been involved in group exhibitions in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Copenhagen and Vienna, published a book titled GLAIRE (Ma Bibliothéque, 2017), and presented their performance work Potash Lesson (2016) in Glasgow, London, Berlin and Belfast. Jamie is currently developing a new moving image work commissioned by the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, as well as working towards a solo exhibition at Tramway, Glasgow, for 2018. Their work will be featured in Cellular World, a group show at GoMA as part of the Glasgow International 2018 Director’s Programme.

Charlotte Prodger lives and works in Glasgow. Solo shows include Kunsthall Bergen (2017); Subtotal, Sculpture Center, New York (2017); BRIDGIT, Hollybush Gardens, London (2016); Kunstverein Düsseldorf (2016); 8004 – 8019, Spike Island, Bristol (2015); Nephatiti, Glasgow International Director’s Programme (2014); Jason Loebs/​Charlotte Prodger, Essex Street, New York (2012); Percussion Biface 1 – 13, Studio Voltaire, London (2012) and Handclap/​Punchhole, Koppe Astner, Glasgow (2011). Selected group shows include British Art Show 8 (2016); Weight of Data, Tate Britain, London (2015); An Interior That Remains an Exterior; Kunstlerhaus Graz (2015); Holes in the Wall, Kunsthalle Freiburg (2013) and Frozen Lakes, Artists Space, New York (2013). Charlotte is currently working on projects with Bookworks, London and If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution, Amsterdam.