Sorry, your browser is unable to play this video.  to a modern browser and try again.  Sensuous, generous, affecting and more than a little bit daft, Laure Prouvost's art often disarms me. Her work can be light and deft and joyous. Nonetheless, I am genuinely surprised that she has won the 2013 Turner prize.  You never can tell with juries, but I fully expected Tino Sehgal to win. It didn't seem to matter that This is Exchange, his contribution to the show, was nothing more than a series of unostentatious conversations, devised in 2003, in which spectators were offered money to engage in a conversation about the economy with his local collaborators, in an otherwise empty white space. Low-key this work may be, but Sehgal is a game-changer.  David Shrigley is, rightly, enormously popular, but his staged life-drawing class in the Turner prize show – with its galumphing, urinating sculpted life model – is not Shrigley at his best, funny though it is. His sculptures are never as good as his drawings and animations. I don't think Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has nailed it yet as a painter, either. Too much is left dangling with the backstories to her portraits of fictional black subjects. Moreover, in Derry the dramatic staging of her paintings in a semi-darkened space did nothing to help. It just didn't come together.  Prouvost repeated and extended a work she created for Tate Britain's Schwitters in Britain exhibition earlier this year. She gave us a mouldering, dingy farm kitchen, decorated with clunky sculptures and teapots, all supposedly made by her fictitious artist grandfather (whose ghost she has evoked in other works). Her grandparents' kitchen was the backdrop to a video that described his disappearance after tunnelling his way out of his home, never to return. A second video here was nowhere as good as the work that recently won her the Max Mara art prize for women.  That said, Prouvost's mix of real and fabricated objects, sprightly drawing, autobiography, fiction and wordplay (she inhabits a terrain vague of misspelling and thought, caught somewhere between English and her native French) is fertile territory. One can see all sorts of affinities in her work to a younger generation of British artists, including Heather Phillipson, Helen Marten and Ed Atkins, as well as to figures such as Kurt Schwitters and Pipilotti Rist. Words and stories are important for them all, a quality they in turn share with each of this year's Turner prize contenders. Yet I cannot but think that Sehgal is the best artist here.
Adrian Searle: Laure Prouvost is beguiling, eclectic and creative, but it is still a surprise she triumphed over Tino Sehgal