Despite the rumors which gave this favorite of the race losing due to the horrors of the war between Israel and Hamas, Tarik Kiswanson, born July 19, 1986 in Halmstad, Swedish, French, Jordanian and Palestinian visual artist, is indeed the winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2023.

This prize, ardently supported by ADIAF and its collectors, will be announced at Artcurial, the Center Pompidou having been sidelined by the strike voted for this Monday, October 16.

The four finalists are exhibited in Beaubourg in the museum rooms usually reserved for the Graphic Art Cabinet. We will have to wait until the end of the strike to discover them.

Tarik Kiswanson was widely noted for his surrealist sculptural installations at the Guimet Museum, during the last Lyon Biennale.

Among a set of works, underlines the Center Pompidou, Tarik Kiswanson, “explores forms and states resulting from the experience of war, trauma and displacement: reconstruction and rebirth both collective and social, individual and intimate . A poetic space, as if suspended between memory and regeneration.

His award should provoke many reactions in an art world which 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 Bak, a Frenchwoman of Polish ancestry, was given the favorite. She offers a video installation entitled Nature Morte. 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 site of an unbalanced North/South relationship, with the plants massively sold in Northern cities often coming from the Southern countryside.

Bouchra Khalili presents a selection of works on the complex relationships between language, translation, speaking, poetry and their close links with the imagination of a future community.

Finally, Massinissa Selmani offers an installation under the sign of the ellipse, entitled A plot of horizon in the middle of the day. His project is conceived as a large drawing featuring the migration of his drawn forms from one media to another, from paper to animated film, from sculpture to wall drawing. Tinted with gravity, absurdity and notes of humor, the whole is constructed as a sum of territories of fictional conflicts.