What does an Italian monk have in common with an Indonesian housewife? It’s not the start of a joke—this unusual question was one of the driving queries behind the inventive proposal that won this year’s Max Mara Art Prize For Women. Now in its tenth edition, the prize went to Indonesian artist Dian Suci for her genre-bending exploration of spirituality across Indonesia and Italy. Upon receiving the prize, Suci will be undertaking a spiritual journey of her own in Italy over the next six months, one that will take her from Umbrian monasteries to training programmes in crafting papier-mâché.
Suci’s winning proposal, titled Crafting Spirit: Cultural Dialogues in Heritage and Practice, explores how spirituality endures across cultures as a form of opposition to capitalism and market dynamics. Proposed as a comparative study across Indonesia and Italy, Suci’s inquiry will unpack how intangible forms of spirituality are translated into the tangible—where craftsmanship and artisanship turn spirituality into an everyday form of resistance. “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,” Suci shares.
Based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Suci’s work is as expansive as its subject matter. It spans the mediums of sculpture, installation, video, and painting, and is only the latest example of the deeply considered, innovative artistry honoured by the Max Mara Art Prize For Women. The initiative is unique in many ways—for its focus on female artists at the mid-point of their careers, for the six-month Italian residency it offers the winner—but Suci’s win marks a new era for the prize. Beginning with this year’s edition, the initiative enters a new “nomadic” phase: no longer limiting itself to UK-based applicants, the prize will travel to a different region every year, selecting the winner from a diverse pool of local talent.
The first institution to partner with Max Mara in the prize’s new era was the Museum MACAN in Jakarta, Indonesia. Suci was selected from a shortlist of five finalists based in Indonesia, announced ahead of the Venice Biennale by Max Mara, Collezione Maramotti, Museum MACAN, and prize curator Cecilia Alemani. “The unique nature of Dian’s project lies in the analytic gaze it turns on spirituality: not as an escape from reality, but as resilient response to the invasive influences of capitalism and mass production,” says Alemani. “Her practice is perfectly aligned with the core concept of this prize, whose tenth edition has chosen to explore the artistic landscape of Indonesia.”
Following the announcement of her winning proposal, Suci will now embark on a six-month residency across Italy, studying the nation’s particular forms of spirituality and how they are kept alive by the artisans of today. Here, perhaps, she will find an answer to the uncommon question posed by her proposal: her residency will begin in Assisi, the heart of Franciscanism, where she will live among Umbrian monks to study their way of life, and will include a special mass at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The final two stages of her residency will be completed in Puglia and Tuscany, where she will experience intensive immersions in the crafts of papier-mâché, egg tempera, and handweaving. Of her upcoming spiritual journey across Italy, Suci says, “I receive this opportunity with gratitude and a commitment to listen, to learn, and to translate these encounters into forms that honour the intimacy of human labour and the depth of cultural continuity.”
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