# How an Indonesian Artist Won Six Months Studying Spirituality in Italy > Dian Suci's proposal linking Yogyakarta's women artisans to Umbrian monks won her the tenth Max Mara Art Prize for Women, the first edition of a newly nomadic award that now looks beyond the UK for its winners. - Source: VUUQUE - Canonical URL: https://vuuque.com/article/dian-suci-max-mara-art-prize-women - Author: VUUQUE Editorial - Section: Culture - Published: 2026-08-23T14:35:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-23T14:35:00.000Z - Tags: Dian Suci, Max Mara Art Prize, Indonesia, Art --- Yogyakarta-based artist Dian Suci, whose work spans sculpture, installation, video and painting, has won the tenth Max Mara Art Prize for Women with a proposal built around an unlikely pairing: Italian monks and Indonesian housewives, connected by how spirituality survives inside the everyday gestures of the people who practice a craft. ## A proposal about resistance through craft Suci's winning submission, titled Crafting Spirit: Cultural Dialogues in Heritage and Practice, treats spirituality as a comparative study across Indonesia and Italy, tracing how something intangible gets translated into tangible, everyday resistance against capitalism and market dynamics through craftsmanship and artisanship. "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 said of the project. ## A prize that just went nomadic The Max Mara Art Prize for Women is built around supporting female artists at the mid-point of their careers, with a six-month Italian residency as its centerpiece. Until this edition it drew only from UK-based applicants; starting with Suci's win, the prize enters what its organizers call a nomadic phase, rotating each year to a different region and its local talent pool. Museum MACAN in Jakarta is the first institution to partner in this new format, and Suci was selected from a shortlist of five Indonesia-based finalists 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 a resilient response to the invasive influences of capitalism and mass production," Alemani said, calling it well matched to a tenth edition built around Indonesia's art scene. ## Monasteries, papier-mâché, and a mass at St. Peter's Suci's six-month residency traces a specific route through Italy. It begins in Assisi, the seat of Franciscanism, where she will live alongside Umbrian monks to study their way of life, and includes a special mass at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. The final two legs move to Puglia and Tuscany for hands-on training in papier-mâché, egg tempera and handweaving. "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," Suci said of the journey ahead. --- Originally published by VUUQUE. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://vuuque.com/article/dian-suci-max-mara-art-prize-women.