Dian Suci Wins the 10th Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Setting a New Course for the Award
Indonesian multimedia artist Dian Suci has won the 10th Max Mara Art Prize for Women, an edition that signals a broader geographic reach for the long-running award. The announcement was made in Venice at a celebration held at the Serra dei Giardini, where Suci was selected from a shortlist of five finalists.
The prize will support a six-month traveling residency in Italy for Suci’s new project, Crafting Spirit: Cultural Dialogues in Heritage and Practice. The work will examine the tension between commerce and spirituality in mass-produced devotional objects across Italy and Indonesia, a subject that places material culture, belief, and labor in direct conversation.
In a statement, Suci said she was “deeply honored” to receive the prize and described the project as emerging from “stories of the body and memory” in the lives and gestures of women artisans. She added that she hopes to translate those encounters into forms that honor “the intimacy of human labor and the depth of cultural continuity.”
The jury was chaired by Cecilia Alemani and included Venus Lau, Amanda Ariawan, Megan Arlin, Melati Suryodarmo, and Evelyn Halim. The prize’s 10th cycle will run through 2027, and with this edition it has shifted into a traveling format. Earlier iterations were organized with Whitechapel Gallery in London and centered on U.K.-based women artists.
The completed work will be shown first at Museum MACAN in Jakarta in summer 2027. It will then travel to the Collezione Maramotti in Italy in fall 2027, where it will be acquired.
Previous winners of the prize include Dominique White, Emma Talbot, and Helen Cammock. With Suci’s selection, the award continues to foreground women artists while widening the frame of where their work is made, seen, and collected.
