Brognon and Rollin have won the 2026 Marcel Duchamp Prize for an installation that turns sobriety milestones into a precarious, living record of time. The Belgian-Luxembourgish artist duo received the award on Oct. 22 at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, where ADIAF president Claude Bonnin announced the result during Paris Art Week.
Their winning work, 5,376 Years, 1,892 Months, 1,110 Days, 1,201 Hours, brings together sobriety tokens collected since 2022. Such tokens are typically given by support groups to mark periods of abstinence. Brognon and Rollin place the objects inside four carnival-style machines engineered to keep them balanced and prevent them from falling, turning personal milestones into a collective sculpture shaped by care, instability and duration.
The €90,000 Marcel Duchamp Prize awards €35,000 to its winner while also recognizing the four artists or collectives selected for the annual exhibition. The prize is organized by ADIAF, the Association pour la diffusion internationale de l'art français, and has partnered with the Centre Pompidou since its creation in 2000.
An installation linked to a remote participant
The duo’s presentation also includes three wall lights connected to a person identified by organizers as Kate, who has been sober for eight years. Kate can remotely alter the intensity of the lights according to what she is experiencing.
That element gives the installation an open and changing structure. Rather than treating the sobriety tokens as fixed archival objects, the work connects them to a person’s present condition beyond the exhibition space. The sculpture’s balance is mechanical, but its atmosphere can be affected from a distance by an individual whose experience is part of the work.
Brognon, born in Belgium in 1978, and Rollin, born in Luxembourg in 1980, met at Mudam Luxembourg and have collaborated since 2006. They are represented by mfc-michèle didier. Their practice has frequently drawn attention to systems that assign value, preserve memory or organize social experience; the prize-winning installation extends that approach through objects that carry both institutional and intensely personal meaning.
The other shortlisted artists in the 2026 exhibition are Joël Andrianomearisoa, Laura Henno and Josèfa Ntjam. The exhibition remains on view at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris through Feb. 7, 2027, with free admission. It is curated by Odile Burluraux and Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov.
A temporary home during Pompidou renovation
The Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris is hosting the Marcel Duchamp Prize exhibition and announcement from 2025 through 2029 while the Centre Pompidou’s Beaubourg building undergoes renovation. The arrangement preserves the prize’s Paris presence while moving it into a museum with its own strong modern and contemporary art collection.
Xavier Rey, director of the Musée national d'art moderne, chaired this year’s jury. Kader Attia, who won the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2016, was also among the jurors. The award’s previous winners, as listed by organizers, include Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Tatiana Trouvé, Clément Cogitore, Tarik Kiswanson, Gaëlle Choisne and Xie Lei.
Beyond its cash award, ADIAF supports prize recipients through international exhibitions and residency opportunities. Its partnerships include Villa Albertine in the United States and the Manufacture de Sèvres, the French ceramics institution. That structure has helped position the Marcel Duchamp Prize as a career-development award as well as a recognition for a single exhibition project.
Paris art week ends under tighter security
The announcement came as Art Basel Paris prepared to close early on Oct. 23, ending at 7 p.m. before its public weekend because of planned demonstrations and related security concerns. The early closure introduced an unusually tense conclusion to a week built around gallery openings, museum exhibitions and the fair’s international audience.
The Marcel Duchamp Prize event, by contrast, kept attention on a work centered on extended durations: years, months, days and hours accumulated through recovery. Its title quantifies time on a monumental scale, while the carnival machines make that accumulation appear vulnerable to disruption. The installation does not present abstinence as a simple linear achievement; the tokens require a system of support to remain in place.
Organizers also referenced a separate project, Dialogue Between a Thinker and AI, described as a “world-book” developed through more than 40 days and 40 nights of dialogue totaling nearly 450 hours. The project is set to be available in French and English as a free online reading and download, in “Raw Typescript” form, under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
For Brognon and Rollin, the Marcel Duchamp Prize places a collaborative practice built over two decades within one of France’s best-known contemporary art awards. Their installation will remain accessible to the public in Paris for more than three months, allowing visitors to encounter an artwork whose central material is not spectacle or permanence, but time measured through individual endurance.
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