Prix Marcel Duchamp 2022

With support from the Adiaf (Association for the International Dissemination of French Art) 

The artists 

Giulia Andreani 

Giulia Andreani’s practice is based on historical narratives – fragile stories or tragedies at the human level – that she discovers through her research and archival work. The artist interrogates the layers of history and reassembles this visual and textual archive in unique photomontages in her work as a painter. She unearths unique stories of women grappling with major historical events, their fates faded into obscurity and left out of the halls of heroes. Using a single colour – Payne’s Grey – her paintings evoke power relations in history, even in the idea of maternity. For the Marcel Duchamp Prize, Giulia Andreani places this intimately connected dual power at the centre of her message, while war rages on Europe’s doorstep: the power to give death, or life. 

Iván Argote 
Whether in his filmed performances or sculptural installations, many of Iván Argote’s works rethink public space through a radical, activist lens. His work is driven by a dual perspective, both playful and political. “My pieces are reflections on the way in which we behave, how we understand our local environment, and how [it] is connected to history, traditions, art, politics and power.” For the Marcel Duchamp Prize, Iván Argote reconsiders the way in which we experience a “memory of forgetting”: in three European public squares (in Paris, Madrid and Rome), he tackles our colonial past by altering the destiny of three monuments, symbols of this part of history that is not over. In the exhibition, obelisks dismembered with velvet, playful and poetic anti-monuments, serve as a foundation for what the artist calls anticipation films. 

Philippe Decrauzat 
Philippe Decrauzat’s paintings and films establish a critical relationship with the history of modernism, by creating a visual and reference-based game using certain perceptive strategies from historic avant-garde and experimental practices, expanding his sources to areas as diverse as graphic design, music and science fiction. His work mobilises optical phenomena that question the author just as much as the state of the image. The complex relationship to time and space – which has become dilated, compressed or cyclical – thereby disrupts apprehension. For the Marcel Duchamp Prize, Philippe Decrauzat offers two separate, complementary spaces. Shaped canvases and a cinematographic “loop” convey the body’s spatio-temporal experience in the exhibition. 

Mimosa Echard 
Mimosa Echard’s work offers unique combinations, with the organic encountering the technological and synthetic. This ambivalent pharmacopoeia infuses a shape-shifting body of work – video, painting, sculpture, installation – that draws from pop culture and psychedelic counterculture. Often produced through collaborations with different creators, including writers and musicians, her pieces trace a material history of tactility that surreptitiously points to another story, just as profoundly political. For the Prize, she has designed an “ambiguous architectural object”. Shifting between the sublime and the contemptible, this “lacrimal” perception machine, or desiring screen, produces uninterrupted flows, reflecting those of our liquid society.