Marcel Duchamp Preis Winner

The practice of this year’s winner, Gaëlle Choisne, draws on multiple traditions, references and techniques, celebrating hybridity as both concept and form. In the tradition of Afrofuturist thought and standing against an unequivocal, materialistic and authoritarian Western vision of the world, she affirms the power of the imagination, fiction and spirituality to reopen the future.

The title of the installation, L'Ère du Verseau [The Age of Aquarius], is an astrological reference to the passage into a new era in the history of the world. The artist invites us to look at social, political and ecological realities from a different perspective: with distance, as vestiges of another time or universe, from the perspective of the possibility of change.
The materials (Ruches [Hives] made from cork), the sculptures and videos, the "scrap paintings" - cobbled-together assemblages of images, paint and objects (Safe Space for a passing history) - highlight the themes, or rather the driving forces, often chosen by Gaëlle Choisne: hospitality, exchange and giving, benevolence, repair.

In Abdelkader Benchamma's work, drawing - his preferred medium - is not seen as a fixed object, defined by the rectangle of the sheet of paper, but as an energy that takes over space and time. The title of the installation, Au bord des mondes [At the Edge of the Worlds], is borrowed from the book of contemporary philosopher Mohamed Amer Meziane which invites to enter at the heart of the invisible. In reference to a thinking that stands between worlds, the meaning of each drawn form is both offered and eluded.
The line oscillates between figuration and abstraction, geological memory and contemporary apparitions, traces of the visible world and journeys towards other systems of interpretation of the world, whether spiritual or symbolic. Drawn in ink directly on the walls and then partially erased, this environment is also inlaid with other drawings and projections; it is a heterogeneous impure and constantly fertile flow, in the image of thought itself.
Going against a rationalist desire to understand the world fully and recognising that there is a certain amount that we never will, a certain amount of error and disquiet, this is the cost for the work to retain its power to reveal.

Noémie Goudal’s installation immerses us in enigmatic settings where multiple layers of still and moving images, light and sound create an environment that is both recognisable and alien. A primitive cave in Grand Vide [Great Void] and a geological landscape in Supra Strata are caught up in an inescapable movement of disarticulation, generated in one case by the photographic medium dissolving and in the other by its splintering.
Far from any form of catastrophising, Noémie Goudal’s work aims to reverse the way we perceive physical phenomena and the passage of time.

The artist draws on science (notably palaeoclimatology], but also on the technical means offered by photography to reveal that which escapes our human senses she uses experimentation and special effects to reproduce unmeasurable phenomena by hand. In this way, the artist tells a tale of "the extinction and rebirth of the world", reminding us that earthly reality “not a fixed state but a perpetual cycle between day and night, life and death, order and disorder.

Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain have been exploring sign systems and the ways in which they make cosmic and cosmological phenomena understandable for some twenty years.
The process at the heart of their work, often described as conceptual, is above all poetic: it involves transposing words or concepts from other forms of legibility into a new visual language. In this way, the names of the Moon's seas become drops of light falling on the surface of a mineral disc. In this way, the names of the stars in the Eridanus constellation unfold in a new river of stars in the exhibition space.

Flowering of Light reflects Detanico and Lain's fascination with the idea of the universe. The double projection echoes the way in which the ancient sciences envisaged the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm. In a single visual breath, the work links the melancholic shimmer of deep fields (images of areas of the sky very far from Earth) and the blossoming of a field in spring. Between the very distant and the very near, our perception of time and space wavers.