Despite rumours that this favourite in the race was losing due to the horrors of the war between Israel and Hamas, Tarik Kiswanson, born on 19 July 1986 in Halmstad, a Swedish, French, Jordanian and Palestinian visual artist, is indeed the winner of the 2023 Marcel Duchamp Prize.
This prize, ardently supported by the ADIAF and its collectors, will be announced at Artcurial, the Centre Pompidou having been put out of action by the strike voted on Monday 16 October.
The four finalists are exhibited in Beaubourg in the museum's rooms usually reserved for the Graphic Art Cabinet. We'll have to wait until the end of the strike to find out.
Tariq Kiswanson was very noticed for his surrealist sculptural installations at the Musée Guimet, during the last Lyon Biennial.
Among a set of works, the Centre Pompidou points out, Tarik Kiswanson "explores forms and states arising from the experience of war, trauma and displacement: reconstruction and rebirth that are both collective and social, individual and intimate. A poetic space, as if suspended between memory and regeneration."
His award is likely to provoke a lot of reactions in an art world that has not forgotten politics, especially since the attacks in Israel and the war in Palestine that they triggered
In recent days, given this context, Bertille Bakn, a French woman of Polish descent, was considered the favourite. She proposes a video installation entitled Still Life. This project takes as its starting point one of the most popular calendar holidays: Valentine's Day. Ecologically absurd, the flower industry is also the terrain of an unbalanced North/South relationship, with plants massively sold in northern cities often coming from the countryside of the south.
Bouchra Khalili presents a selection of works on the complex relationships between language, translation, speech, poetry and their close links with the imaginary of a future community.
Finally, Massinissa Selmani proposes an installation under the sign of the ellipse, entitled Une parcelle d'horizon au milieu du jour. His project is conceived as a large drawing staging the migration of his drawn forms from one medium to another, from paper to animated film, from sculpture to wall drawing. Tinged with gravity, absurdity and hints of humour, the whole is constructed as a sum of territories of fictional conflicts.