AMSTERDAM.- The Stedelijk Museum is presenting the single-channel video installation SaF05 by Turner Prize winner Charlotte Prodger (Bournemouth, 1974). Prodger is regarded as one of today’s most original time-based media artists. The video installation SaF05 was previously on view during the 2019 La Biennale di Venezia where Prodger represented Scotland, and was produced in collaboration with Stedelijk Museum presentation partner If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution.

SaF05 draws upon multiple sources—archival, scientific and diaristic—and combines footage from a number of geographical locations (the Scottish Highlands, the Great Basin Desert (western US), the Okavango Delta (Botswana) and the Ionian Islands of Greece). SaF05 is named after a rare maned lioness that figures in the work as a cipher for queer attachment and desire. This animal was the last of several maned lionesses documented in the Okavango Delta, known only to Prodger through a database of behaviors and camera-trap footage logged by conservationists.

Prodger’s ongoing preoccupation with perspective and the materialities of capture devices is expanded in SaF05. The sound of the drone is a sonic motif that mutates throughout the soundtrack via a bagpipe, a cicada mating call, a saxophone, a battery alarm—syncopated equivalences between animal and human, instrument and machine. Prodger’s autobiographical voiceover traces a chronology of intimate gestures and interpersonal connections from pubescence to the present, inscribed with the wider political structures of sovereignty, land use and territory. SaF05 is a meditation on relations, however intangible, that expand and diffuse conceptions of intimacy, sexuality, and kinship.

SaF05 is commissioned on the occasion of the 58th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia by the Scotland + Venice partnership, supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and curated by Linsey Young with Cove Park. SaF05 is produced in partnership with If I Can’t Dance I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, with support from Mercer Union, Toronto, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Hollybush Gardens, London and Kendall Koppe, Glasgow.