Rome, November 5 (askanews) – Three female artists are the finalists for the MAXXI Bulgari Prize 2026: Chiara Bersani, Adji Dieye, and Margherita Moscardini. The exhibition, featuring three previously unseen works produced for the Prize, curated by Giulia Ferracci, will be open until March 7. Adji Dieye's large installation, "Una Resa senza Caduta," is a tubular iron structure wrapped in rayon veils.
The installation reproduces, upside down and unsteadily balanced, the silhouette of the tower of the French West Africa Pavilion at the 1931 Paris International Colonial Exhibition, a structure built to offer the European public an image of Africa on an imperial scale. By inverting a building originally intended to showcase the colonies, Dieye makes visible how images captured then continue to shape the gaze today. With "A Road," Margherita Moscardini intertwines sculpture and law.
A bronze sculpture reproduces a stretch of the sidewalk on Via Guido Reni, the street on which the MAXXI stands. The project recalls a category of Roman law, "res nullius in bonis," or things that are not part of anyone's property. The artist has developed a proposal to supplement the Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape, establishing non-appropriable and inalienable assets, intended for collective enjoyment. In the adjacent room, "Blanche.
Chiara Bersani's "He Made a Bed in My Hearing" is a small wooden box covered in stucco and plaster, joined to a functioning lyre. The starting point is an Egyptian mummy preserved at the British Museum that shows signs of osteogenesis imperfecta, the same condition the artist lives with. Bersani transforms it into a sarcophagus and a ritual, periodically activating the work with her voice and lyre, in a song offered as a gift to all those living bodies that are not recognized in civil society. On February 23, in a dedicated ceremony, the jury will announce the winner of the fifth edition of the Prize, which unites MAXXI and the Bvlgari Foundation in supporting artistic talent. Her work will be acquired by the Museum and become part of the MAXXI Collection.
Askanews