Adel Abdessemed is a prominent figure of the international art scene. From drawing to video, from sculpture to installation, Adel probes in the wounds of our present. His work has been the subject, during the last thirty years, of numerous major solo exhibitions, at MoMA PS1 in New York, MIT List Art Center in Cambridge (Massachusetts), Magasin – Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble, at Parasol Unit in London, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Musée national d’Art Moderne – Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris for a retrospective, « Adel Abdessemed. Je suis Innocent » (2012), CAC in Málaga, or at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal. Two major monographic exhibitions take place in 2018: Otchi Tchiornie at the Musée du Grand-Hornu in Belgium, and L’Antidote at the MAC Lyon.

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work.

Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box – as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes – there is always the possibility of what she calls the “human strike.

Best known for his evocative, metaphorical videos and mixed-media installations, Mircea Cantor makes work reflective of a broad worldview that is at once optimistic and trenchantly critical. In his works, he examines competing ideologies, war, displacement, the self and the other, and multivalence. Keenly aware of the multitude of meanings that a word or an object can contain, he deliberately mixes materials and uses language playfully, producing poignant, challenging works that defy neat categorization. He also refuses to be neatly defined, as he explains: “We know who we are, so why not go deeper? Let’s stand for something other than our nationality. [. . .] [My] objects speak of the great openness in which we can live today, beyond national categories.” Cantor won the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2011.