Human thought and experience at the heart of creation
/PRNewswire/ — A long-time partner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, Artprice by Artmarket salutes the victory of the Brognon Rollin duo, announced on Thursday October 22, 2026 by Claude Bonnin, president of the ADIAF, at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. With an installation built around sobriety tokens, David Brognon and Stéphanie Rollin give a sensitive form to the time of abstinence. Their work establishes a particularly direct relationship with the conceptual heritage of Marcel Duchamp and places human experience at the center of creation.
Brognon Rollin, winners, Claude Bonnin President of Adiaf, October 22, 2026 © Luc Castel
The distinction comes during a Paris Art Week disrupted by the early closure of Art Basel Paris, this Friday October 23 at 7 p.m., before its public weekend, due to the announced events and security requirements. At the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the presentation of the Marcel Duchamp Prize constitutes one of the great highlights of this week and opens a reflection which will extend well beyond the fair.
A reference price since 2000
Created in 2000 by ADIAF, the Association for the International Dissemination of French Art, and organized since the beginning with the Center Pompidou, the Marcel Duchamp Prize contributes to the international influence of the French scene. During the renovation of the historic Beaubourg building, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is hosting the exhibitions of the nominated artists and the proclamation of the laureate, from 2025 to 2029.
Endowed with 90,000 euros, including 35,000 euros given to the winner, the Prize recognizes four artists or artist collectives each year. ADIAF extends this support with international exhibitions and residencies, notably with the Villa Albertine in the United States and the Manufacture de Sèvres. His list of achievements brings together, among others, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Tatiana Trouvé, Clément Cogitore, Tarik Kiswanson, Gaëlle Choisne and Xie Lei. Kader Attia, winner in 2016, participated this year in the jury chaired by Xavier Rey, director of the National Museum of Modern Art.
The time of abstinence made visible
David Brognon, born in 1978 in Belgium, and Stéphanie Rollin, born in 1980 in Luxembourg, met at Mudam and have worked together since 2006. Represented by the mfc-michèle didier gallery, they develop a practice attentive to waiting, confinement and people living on the margins of society. Their works take shape through contact with individual situations and trajectories.
Their installation, entitled 5,376 years, 1,892 months, 1,110 days, 1,201 hours, adds up the durations inscribed on the sobriety tokens that they have been collecting since 2022. Handed over to mutual aid groups to mark the stages of abstinence, these objects testify to fragile victories and efforts continued day after day.
In the darkness, four funfair machines receive these tokens. The mechanisms keep them in a precarious balance: they never fall. Three light sconces are connected to Kate, sober for eight years, who modulates the intensity remotely depending on what she is going through. The device brings the rhythm of a real existence into the exhibition.
Each token thus represents a lived duration. The possibility of falling, waiting and perseverance become perceptible. The work opens a meditation on suffering, the effort to hold on and the vulnerability of existence, up to the question of mortality.
A conceptual work in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp
In a personal and sensitive exchange with Thierry Ehrmann, Claude Bonnin, president of ADIAF, underlined the connection of this proposal with the approach of Marcel Duchamp and its double dimension, fully conceptual and profoundly human.
The Marcel Duchamp Prize has always welcomed a diversity of practices, from painting to sculpture, from video to installation. With Brognon Rollin, the relationship with the ready-made appears with particular clarity: pre-existing objects, loaded with uses and histories, are moved and brought together in a device that transforms their meaning. The thought that chooses and relates them becomes constitutive of the work.
Marcel Duchamp, founding figure for conceptual art, profoundly changed the definition of artistic gesture. With the ready-made, choosing an object, designating it and presenting it in another context can constitute an act of creation. The meaning of the work then engages the gaze and the thought as much as its material production.
Brognon Rollin gives this movement a singular human density. The token leaves its initial use and brings into the public space the trace of an intimate struggle. The rigor of the system makes visible what a number alone cannot tell: the weight of a day spent, the uncertainty of the next day, the desire to continue. Stéphanie Rollin sums up this approach in one sentence: “Our main material is people. »
From the conceptual act to the pen entrusted to AI
For Artprice, this edition of the Marcel Duchamp Prize opens an extension in the field of writing: how is the act of creation defined when human thought gives meaning to a form that it has not entirely created by its own hand?
This question crosses Dialogue between a thinker and AIthe world book by Thierry Ehrmann, founder of Artprice and author of La Demeure du Chaos. Over the course of forty days and forty nights of dialogue, nearly four hundred and fifty hours, he confronted artificial intelligence with his memories, his archives, his reasoning and his contradictions. In the introductory text La plume entrustée, he describes his decision to entrust the writing to the AI while continuing the work of thought, comparison and correction, and assuming responsibility for the content.
The connection proposed by Artprice concerns the place of intention, experience and meaning in the creative act. At Brognon Rollin, the selection and connection of objects makes traces of human life accessible. In the book, words and personal archives feed a dialogue whose writing is entrusted to the AI. In each case, the reader or visitor is invited to look beyond the manufacturing process to question what is transmitted to them.
A token can count the days of abstinence; it alone does not contain all the effort they required. Artificial intelligence can shape the story of a life; she did not live the existence from which this story proceeds. This gap gives full scope to the question of transmission: how to make what has been intimately experienced shareable?
Duchamp’s legacy allows us to ask this question with renewed acuteness. Creation can involve the choice, arrangement and formulation of a thought. In the age of AI, this reflection extends into the responsibility of the author, in the experiences he brings and in the meaning to which he responds.
By supporting the Marcel Duchamp Prize, Artprice supports artists who renew our ways of seeing. With Dialogue between a thinker and AIthierry Ehrmann submits for reading an experience which questions our ways of writing and transmitting. The meeting of these two approaches opens up the same space for reflection on the place of humans in creation.
A human-oriented edition
Curated by Odile Burluraux and Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov, the exhibition also brings together Joël Andrianomearisoa, who explores the materiality of emotions between textiles, architecture and writing; Laura Henno, whose photographs and films notably follow clandestine lives in the Comoros and Mayotte; and Josèfa Ntjam, who combines archives, African mythologies and science fiction to move the stories of origin.
Discover the exhibition and continue reading
The exhibition of the four artists nominated for the 2026 Marcel Duchamp Prize is presented at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, as part of the partnership with the Center Pompidou and the ADIAF, until February 7, 2027, with free and open access.
Dialogue between a thinker and AI is available in full in French and English, for free reading and downloading in its Raw Typescript version, under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
French version: https://www.dialoguebetweenathinkerandai.com/fr/
English version: https://www.dialoguebetweenathinkerandai.com/en/
Artprice by Artmarket — Octobre 2026
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