SaF05 (Charlotte Prodger, 2019) (Patreon)

SaF05, the latest video work by Turner Prize winner Charlotte Prodger, could perhaps be considered a video essay, although to call it that would imply a level of directness and clarity SaF05 doesn't have. The work is much more like a constellation of tangentially related concepts, a set of suspended metaphors that are concatenated across the running time without achieving an absolute conclusion. In fact, Prodger is using the positivistic language of science to undermine the fundamental assumptions that organize behaviorism. How can we assess constructs such as sex and gender when there is actually no control group?

The title of SaF05 derives from the code name assigned to a lioness in Botswana. We see her in the opening moments of the film, and even in her absence, she serves as a kind of avatar for Prodger, who adopts the identity of "SaF05." This lioness is a particular subject for researchers because she has grown a mane and has started to exhibit male behaviors. As the visual image scans and maps the lion's territory by car and by drone, Prodger can be heard on the soundtrack telling stories about emotional and sexual encounters with various women, all of whom she refers to by code names derived from the one research scientists have assigned to lioness SaF05. (They include GaF93 and DuF96.) She is describing queer interactions, situations when, by societal standards or by her own reckoning, she was "behaving like a man."

As conceptually rich as SaF05 undoubtedly is, there are ways in which it falls short. I tend to think this may pertain to Prodger's translation of the work from an installation -- it was Scotland's entry at the Venice Biennale -- to a single channel work. There are moments of abstraction -- a flaring light bulb, a Paul Sharits-like color flicker -- that seem out of place, and the landscape material tends to feel a bit disorganized. Nevertheless, SaF05 is a work of sensitivity and wisdom, a timely butch roar.