Yogyakarta-based multimedia artist Dian Suci has won the 10th Max Mara Art Prize for Women (2025–27), marking the first time an Indonesian artist has received the accolade. Established in 2005 by the Max Mara Fashion Group to support emerging and midcareer female visual artists, the award celebrates its 20th anniversary by taking on a new, nomadic format in partnership with Jakarta’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara (Museum MACAN), where Suci’s winning project will be exhibited. 

Born in 1985 in Kebumen, Suci creates paintings, videos, and installations that examine the domestication of women in Indonesian politics, often drawing on her own experiences of being a single mother. Through evocative spatial compositions of everyday objects, she interrogates the patriarchal, authoritarian, and capitalist structures that underlie gender-based oppression. Her winning project proposal, Crafting Spirit: Cultural Dialogues in Heritage and Practice, centers on female artisans in Italy and Indonesia whose labor, craftsmanship, and embodied memories are interwoven with ritualistic devotion and socioeconomic struggle. Suci will realize her project during a six-month residency in Italy organized by Collezione Maramotti, traveling through Assisi, Rome, Lecce, and Florence for site visits, studio work, and engagement with experts across various disciplines. Moreover, as part of the prize, she will hold solo shows at Museum MACAN in early 2027, and at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia later that year.

Expressing her gratitude, the artist said in a statement: “This recognition offers me the opportunity to expand my research between Indonesia and Italy, and to learn from traditions and rituals that hold spirituality within the bodies that create. 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, curator of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, noted in a press release: “Suci’s work . . . transform[s] the realm of everyday domestic life into a realm of political resistance. . . . The unique nature of [her] project lies in the analytic gaze it turns on spirituality: not as an escape from reality, but as [a] resilient response to the invasive influences of capitalism and mass production.”

Emmanuelle Richter is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.