Brognon Rollin has won the 2026 Marcel Duchamp Prize for an installation built around alcohol-abstinence tokens, turning private milestones of recovery into a precarious physical system at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.
The Belgian-Luxembourgish duo received the €35,000 winner’s award on Thursday, Oct. 22, during an announcement at the museum, which is hosting the prize exhibition while the Centre Pompidou’s Beaubourg building undergoes renovation. Their work, 5,376 years, 1,892 months, 1,110 days, 1,201 hours, gathers tokens awarded by support groups to mark periods of sobriety and places them within a moving installation that remains deliberately unsettled.
The prize, founded in 2000 by ADIAF, the Association pour la diffusion internationale de l’art français, carries a total endowment of €90,000. It selects four French-linked artists or artist collectives each year, with the winner receiving €35,000 and the finalists also gaining support through exhibitions and international residency programs.
Recovery rendered as a shifting installation
Brognon Rollin’s winning work uses four carnival-style machines to hold the collected tokens in an unstable balance. The objects move within the apparatuses but do not fall, creating an image of endurance that avoids treating abstinence as a fixed or completed condition.
The title totals the lengths of sobriety represented by the tokens: 5,376 years, 1,892 months, 1,110 days and 1,201 hours. The installation draws attention to how recovery is often measured in intensely personal units of time, from a single hour to a lifetime, while bringing those measurements together as a collective record.
Three wall-mounted lights form another part of the piece. Their brightness is remotely adjusted by a person identified as Kate, who has been free from alcohol addiction for eight years. The changing illumination connects the gallery display to an experience outside the museum, allowing the work’s appearance to respond to an individual’s changing condition rather than follow a fixed exhibition schedule.
The approach reflects Brognon Rollin’s long-running interest in social structures, personal testimony and the systems that define who is recognized, excluded or supported. Rather than presenting recovery through documentary imagery or a linear narrative, the artists use found objects and mechanisms to make time, vulnerability and persistence visible.
Brognon was born in Belgium in 1978 and Rollin was born in Luxembourg in 1980. They have worked together since 2006, after meeting at Mudam, Luxembourg’s contemporary art museum. The duo is represented by the Paris-based mfc-michèle didier gallery.
Musée d’art moderne hosts the prize during Pompidou renovation
The 2026 presentation is part of a temporary relocation for one of France’s most closely watched contemporary-art prizes. ADIAF has organized the Marcel Duchamp Prize with the Centre Pompidou since its early years, but the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris will host the shortlisted-artists exhibition and the winner announcement from 2025 through 2029 while the Pompidou building is renovated.
The exhibition remains open through Feb. 7, 2027, with free admission. Alongside Brognon Rollin, the shortlist includes Joël Andrianomearisoa, Julien Henno and Tabita Rezaire Ntjam, identified in the prize materials as Andrianomearisoa, Henno and Ntjam.
The winner was selected by a jury chaired by Xavier Rey, director of the Musée national d’art moderne. Kader Attia, the Marcel Duchamp Prize recipient in 2016, was among this year’s jurors. Previous winners cited by ADIAF include Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Tatiana Trouvé, Clément Cogitore, Tarik Kiswanson, Kapwani Kiwanga Choisne and Mimosa Echard Lei.
The prize has often served as a prominent platform for artists whose work moves between installation, film, sculpture, digital media and social practice. Its placement within Paris Art Week gives the award international visibility, even as the winning installation focuses on a subject far removed from the commercial spectacle surrounding major art fairs.
Art Basel Paris closed early amid planned demonstrations
The announcement came during a disrupted week for Paris’s art market calendar. Art Basel Paris closed early on Friday, Oct. 23, at 7 p.m., ahead of the public weekend, citing planned demonstrations and associated security concerns.
The fair’s shortened schedule contrasted with the museum-based Marcel Duchamp Prize exhibition, which will remain available to visitors for several months. That longer format gives audiences time to encounter an installation that depends on close observation: the accumulated tokens, their mechanical movement and the altered light conditions provide a slower experience than the rapid viewing typical of an art-fair floor.
Brognon Rollin’s work also places the language of counting at its center. In support-group settings, tokens can mark days, months or years without alcohol; in the museum, the same objects become evidence of repeated effort rather than simple symbols of achievement. The machines’ unresolved balance keeps that effort present throughout the exhibition, rather than converting it into a finished story.
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