Indonesian-born artist Dian Suci has been awarded the 2025–27 Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Cecilia Alemani, curator of the prize and chair of the jury, along with representatives from the Museum MACAN, the Collezione Maramotti, and the family that founded the fashion brand Max Mara made the announcement today at the opening of the Venice Biennale.
The award, established in 2005 to support mid-career women artists, gives Suci a six-month traveling residency in Italy customized to her winning project proposal. The residency will culminate with solo exhibitions at the Museum MACAN in Jakarta and at the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, Italy, which will acquire the new works.
Suci’s work, which ranges between installation, painting, sculpture, and video, frequently addresses how domestic experience intersects with state political power. Her proposal, titled “Crafting Spirit: Cultural Dialogues in Heritage and Practice,” will explore spiritual traditions in Italy and Indonesia as manifested in artisanal practices.
With stays in the Italian cities of Assisi, Umbria, Rome, Lecce, and Florence, Suci will focus on how the handcrafting of votive objects and religious images functions within contemporary culture as a form of resilience. “My proposal,” Suci said in a statement, “emerges from stories of the body and memory within the lives and gestures of women artisans, whose work often exists between devotion and survival.”
Said Alemani, “Dian Suci’s work impressed me with its extraordinary capacity to transform the realm of everyday domestic life into a realm of political resistance. Her practice is perfectly aligned with the core concept of this prize, whose tenth edition has chosen to explore the artistic landscape of Indonesia.”
