Conceptual Duo Brognon Rollin Bags €35,000 Marcel Duchamp Prize
The award, first presented in 2000, has this year recognised the work of David Brognon and Stéphanie Rollin, whose installations and multidisciplinary practice consider both the passage of time and empowering people on the margins of society.
Conceptual art duo Brognon Rollin has won this year’s Marcel Duchamp Prize. The €35,000 award, now in its 26th year, shortlists four French contemporary artists who “represent the diversity and vitality of the French art scene”, before a 10-strong international jury picks the winner.
David Brognon and Stéphanie Rollin, who have been collaborating for 20 years and who work between Paris and Luxembourg, were selected from a final four that also included multidisciplinary artist Joël Andrianomearisoa, writer, director and photographer Laura Henno, and photomontage specialist and sculptor Josèfa Ntjam.
Fabrice Hergott, director of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and a member of this year’s jury, described Brognon Rollin as having contributed a “demanding body of work that gives tangible form to what usually escapes our gaze: the passage of time spent waiting, addiction and inner resilience”.
For the Prix Marcel Duchamp exhibition, which this year takes place at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris while the Centre Pompidou is being renovated, Brognon Rollin has created 5376 Years, 1892 Months, 1110 Days, 1201 Hours (2026), a collection of arcade-style coin-pusher machines containing sobriety tokens. The title reflects the total hours represented by all the tokens in the installation.
The pushers are stripped of their familiar gaudy liveries so the only colour comes from the tokens inside. In parallel, a real person, Kate, who has been sober for eight years, remotely switches on the exhibition lights whenever she feels a moment of pride or doubt.
Hergott said the installation “fundamentally shifts our perspective”, and described the work as a “quiet yet tenacious statement on human vulnerability and the exploration of our inner lives”.
Brognon and Rollin met at Mudam Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg and began collaborating in 2006. The duo’s practice—spanning installation, performance, sculpture, video and photography—considers time, duration and the edges of society. Their artworks begin with research and observation, and include objects, sounds and symbolic elements.
The duo’s 24H Silence project, which has been ongoing since 2020, consists of jukeboxes containing pressings of minutes of silence from ceremonies of remembrance and sports fixtures. The sounds captured are at the edges of the silence—a cough, perhaps—except for one, in which a silence dedicated to George Floyd gradually changes as the crowd chants “I can’t breathe”.
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The Marcel Duchamp Prize was established in 2000 by the Association for the International Diffusion of French Art (ADIAF) in partnership with the Centre Pompidou. Each year its four finalists receive an exhibition, and ADIAF also provides €40,000 in support for the artists and their galleries.
The members of this year’s jury, alongside Hergott, were Xavier Rey, director of Centre Pompidou; Claude Bonnin, chair of ADIAF; Akemi Shiraha, representing the Marcel Duchamp Association; collector Fernando Arriola, artist Kader Attia; artist Berlinde de Bruyckere, Karin Hindsbo, director of London’s Tate Modern; Martin Bethenod, director of France’s National Centre for Visual Arts; and collector Marie-Cécile Zinsou.
Rey described this year’s shortlist as “outstanding”, and said it “prompted stimulating discussions among the jury members”. He continued: “The 2026 Prix Marcel Duchamp is awarded to Brognon Rollin for a body of work that reveals an intimate dimension of the human experience with which we can all connect, through remarkable and ever-evolving aesthetic forms”.
