GaËlle Choisne Wins 2024 Prix Marcel Duchamp

French Haitian artist Gaëlle Choisne has been announced as the winner of this year’sPrix Marcel Duchamp, France’s most prestigious contemporary art prize. The honor, presented annually to an artist who is French or living in France by the Association for the International Diffusion of French Art, is accompanied by a €35,000 ($38,000) purse. Choisne will also receive a two-year residency at renowned porcelain factory and museum Sèvres – Manufacture and Musée Nationaux.

Born in Cherbourg, France, in 1985, to a Haitian mother and a Breton father, Choisne lives and works in Paris. She is known for work across fields including sculpture, drawing, video, and photography that mingles Creole mythology, oral traditions, mysticism, and pop culture to address themes such as catastrophe, colonialism, and the exploitation of natural resources. Shedescribedher prizewinning installationL’Ère du Verseau(The Age of Aquarius), which comprises cork structures, large painted wooden panels, and video projections, as “an island, an archipelago, a place where different realities accumulate to be reinvented and repaired.”

“Given the fragility and experimental nature of her work, Gaëlle Choisne succeeds in mixing gravity and lightness through multiple, multidisciplinary experiments that invite us to enter into her system,” said Xavier Rey, director of Paris’s Musée National d’Art Moderne and a member of the prize jury, in a statement. “Scholarly and vernacular, her work moves through the tension it creates between the everyday and the extraordinary, awareness of history and projection into the future.”

Choisne beat out a short list that included Abdelkader Benchamma, Noémie Goudal, and the duo Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain. Previous recipients of the award include Kader Attia, Latifa Echakhch, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Thomas Hirschhorn, Kapwani Kiwanga, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, and Tarik Kiswanson. An exhibition of work by Choisne and this year’s finalists is on view at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, through January 6, 2025.