Dian Suci Named Winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women at the Venice Biennale

On the 7th of May, 2026, against the gilded backdrop of La Biennale di Venezia, one name rose above all others. Indonesian artist Dian Suci was announced as the winner of the tenth edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, one of contemporary art’s most prestigious and transformative honors. The announcement was made in conjunction with the opening of the 61st International Art Exhibition by Cecilia Alemani, curator of the prize and chair of the jury, alongside Sara Piccinini, Director of Collezione Maramotti, Venus Lau, Director of Museum MACAN, and Elia Maramotti, representative of the founding family behind Max Mara and Collezione Maramotti.

Born in 1985 in Kebumen, Indonesia, and based in Yogyakarta, Suci emerged from a shortlist of five finalists that included Betty Adii, Dzikra Afifah, Ipeh Nur and Mira Rizki. Hers is a practice built at the intersection of domestic narratives and state political power, drawing on her lived experience as a single mother to interrogate the patriarchy, authoritarianism, and the relentless machinery of capitalism. Working across installation, painting, sculpture, and video with an acute sensitivity to spatial composition, she speaks in a language that is both intimate and politically charged.

The Spirit Behind the Craft

The project that secured Suci the prize is titled Crafting Spirit: Cultural Dialogues in Heritage and Practice. Elegant in its premise and radical in its ambition, it springs from the lives and gestures of women artisans whose labor exists somewhere between devotion and survival. Suci positions craft not as a decorative act but as a living archive, a mirror of the cultural, social, and economic evolution of a nation.

At the heart of her inquiry lies a question that resonates far beyond the studio: when spirituality meets the machinery of mass production and global capital, what survives? Through a comparative lens that spans Indonesia and Italy, she will trace the handcrafting of votive objects and religious imagery as sites of both exploitation and resilience, examining how belief, encoded in repetitive physical gestures and manual labor, can endure even within systems permeated by injustice and market logic.

Italy as Living Laboratory

Suci’s prize includes a six-month travelling residency in Italy, meticulously organized by Collezione Maramotti and tailored to the evolution of her project. It is an itinerary as poetic as it is precise, moving through four Italian cities, each chosen for its layered relationship with craft, faith, and material culture.

In Assisi, where she begins her residency until July 15th, she immerses herself in the life of the monks at the Monastery of San Masseo, studying the contradictions between religious devotion and the commercialization of belief, guided by local history expert Francesco Lampone and artist Peter Bartlett. The city itself carries particular resonance this year, as it marks the 800th anniversary of Saint Francis’s death.

From July 15th to 31st, Rome becomes her laboratory. A guest of the Istituto Svizzero, she will attend Mass at Saint Peter’s Basilica alongside a liturgy expert, dissecting the symbolism and hidden meanings of sacred ritual in one of the world’s most visited sites of faith, where the sacred and the spectacle are inseparable.

August through September brings Suci to Lecce, the baroque jewel of Puglia. Here, she will explore the craft and history of papier-mâché, both Eastern and Western, in a program developed by artist and artisan Stella Ciardo, curator Gioele Melandri, and the P.I.A – Scuola Indipendente per le Arti Visive e gli Studi Curatoriali.

Her residency concludes in Florence from late September through November, where two encounters await her. At Fondazione Arte della Seta Lisio, she will acquire handweaving skills and deepen her understanding of the ecclesiastical applications of silk. A workshop with Chiara Mignani, conservator and professor at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure and the Accademia di Belle Arti Bologna, will introduce her to the technique and historical arc of egg tempera painting.

A Prize With a Vision

Established in 2005 by Max Mara, the Max Mara Art Prize for Women holds the distinction of being the first visual arts prize of its kind, created to support emerging and mid-career female-identifying artists at decisive moments in their careers. In its tenth edition, the prize has expanded into a travelling format under the ongoing curation of Cecilia Alemani, Director and Head Curator of High Line Art in New York, with this cycle placing its lens on the contemporary art landscape of Indonesia.

The residency will culminate in a solo exhibition at Museum MACAN in Jakarta in the summer of 2027, followed by a presentation at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia that autumn. The works created will enter the Collezione Maramotti’s permanent collection.

Suci received the honor with characteristic grace: “My proposal emerges from stories of the body and memory within the lives and gestures of women artisans, whose work often exists between devotion and survival. I receive this opportunity with gratitude and a commitment to listen, to learn, and to translate these encounters into forms that honor the intimacy of human labor and the depth of cultural continuity.”

Cecilia Alemani, for her part, articulated what makes Suci’s vision so urgent: her project reads spirituality not as an escape from reality, but as a resilient response to the invasive forces of capitalism and mass production. The contrasts between Umbrian religious art, the papier-mâché tradition of Lecce, and the artisanal excellence of Florence will provide the artist with new tools for mapping how the work of hands can still serve as a stronghold of collective memory.

In a world where everything is a product, Dian Suci is asking us to look at what the hands remember. And Italy, in all its layered, contradictory, magnificent craft tradition, is about to become her answer.