The jury of the new edition of the prestigious  French contemporary art prize awarded the 2017 Prix Marcel Duchamp to the duo Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige.

Born in 1969 in Beirut, the duo lives in Paris and works beteween France and Lebanon. They are represented by Galerie In Situ-fabienne leclerc, Paris and The Third Line, Dubai.

"Artists and filmmakers, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige wonderfully embody those artists who have chosen to come and work in France for the quality and vitality of the artistic life they find here. Settled in Paris, they are today an integral part of our French scene," explained Gilles Fuchs, President of the Adiaf.

For the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2017 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, the two artists propose an environment resolutely in keeping with our present time, touching upon the memory of urban construction sites that they excavated by core drilling to reveal the strata of their respective histories. Impacted by their links to their culture, mixing the history of Lebanon, Greece and France, Hadjithomas and Joreige embody the complexity of intermingled histories where the buried past and the havoc of the present incessantly haunt their conscious.

“The art of Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige suggests an archaeology of memory, at the core of an unfailingly troubled present,” declared Bernard Blistène, President of the jury, Director of the National Museum of Modern Art. Faithful to their multidisciplinary approach, this project brings together complementary forms: sculpture, video, drawing and photography.

Made up from the material of surveyed land, these cores bare their "unconformities"—temporal ruptures, natural disasters, geological movements—in full view, revealing a constant cycle of construction and deconstruction that is the defining feature of civilisations past and present, with each using the stones of the last. History appears not as layers but as actions, a kind of palimpsest mixing epochs and civilizations. These poetic recompositions question the dominant forms of narrating and representing history, but also address debates around the Anthropocene.

The artists also presented a film, Palimpsestes (2017), and a series of photographs of the cores accompanied by drawings, "Zig Zag over time" (2017), which proposed possible narratives for the different strata contained within the samples.
 

About the Marcel Duchamp Prize
One of the most prestigious contemporary art awards, the Marcel Duchamp Prize was created in 2000 by the ADIAF, Association for the International Diffusion of French Art which groups together 400 contemporary art collectors rallied around the French scene. Its ambition is to bring together the most innovative artists and help them raise their international profile. Each year, the Marcel Duchamp Prize is awarded to one of four artists, either French or living in France, all of them working in the field of the plastic and visual arts. Since the outset, this collectors’ prize benefits from a close partnership with the Centre Pompidou who invites the four nominated artists for a 3 months group show in its Galerie 4. The winner is chosen by an international jury of collectors and directors of leading institutions.

2017 nominated artists: Maja Bajevic, Charlotte Moth, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Vittorio Santoro
Curator of the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou: Alicia Knock
Jury: Bernard Blistène, Gilles Fuchs, Carmen Gimenez, Erika Hoffmann, Mao Jihong, Jérôme Sans, Akemi Shiraha

A catalogue is published by the ADIAF which awards the winner an endowment of 35,000 EUR.

The ADIAF benefits from the support of generous sponsors: ADAGP, Artcurial, Comite Professionnel des Galeries d'Art, Fondation d'Enterprise Hermès, Inlex IP Expertise.

Past winners:
Thomas Hirschhorn (2000), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (2002), Mathieu Mercier (2003), Carole Benzaken (2004), Claude Closky (2005), Philippe Mayaux (2006), Tatiana Trouvé (2007), Laurent Grasso (2008), Saâdane Afif (2009), Cyprien Gaillard (2010), Mircea Cantor (2011), Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel (2012), Latifa Echakhch (2013), Julien Prévieux (2014), Melik Ohanian (2015), Kader Attia (2016)
 

Association for the international diffusion of French art
23 Quai Voltaire, 75007 Paris, France 

Contact: adiaf@adiaf.com