London-based artist Ebun Sodipo has won the Fluxus Prize at Art Basel Paris 2026, a €15,000 award that is shared equally between the artist and her gallery. The prize, awarded for the third year by Fluxus Art Projects, went to Sodipo, who is represented by the London gallery Soft Opening, with a special mention for Nina Davies and her gallery Seventeen.

The laureate was announced at the Residence of the Ambassador to Great Britain in Paris on Friday 23 October. The jury brought together six figures from the international art world: Caroline Bourgeois, artistic adviser to François Pinault and curator at the Bourse de Commerce; Clément Delépine, director of Lafayette Anticipations; Belinda de Gaudemar, a patron of the prize; Laurent Issaurat, a trustee of Fluxus Art Projects and prize patron; and Hélène Nguyen-Ban and Véronique Parke, both chair and benefactors of the organisation.

Born in 1993, Sodipo works across assemblage, sculpture, archiving, film, poetry and performance, drawing on ancestral knowledge and contemporary visual culture to explore Black transfeminine experience. Her practice interrogates where the record of that presence exists within the archive of Black experience, and takes up questions of race, gender, sexuality and systems of power, alongside aspiration, intimacy, sensuality, gender euphoria, witchcraft, desire, fantasy, surgery and adornment.

The prize is designed to encourage galleries to show British talent on the international stage and to support their presence at the fair. Soft Opening, founded in 2018 by Antonia Marsh, presents UK-based and international emerging contemporary artists, with a focus on work that pushes the limits of medium and material, and represents twelve artists. The award gives both Sodipo and the gallery a prominent platform at a moment when the fair's Paris edition was drawing attention from across the art world.