MAXXI BVLGARI PRIZE

Chiara Bersani, Adji Dieye, Margherita Moscardini are the three shortlisted artists for the fourth edition of MAXXI Bvlgari Prize, the project for the support and promotion of young artists that brings together MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts and Fondazione Bvlgari, which has launched numerous talents on the international scene over the years.

Their names were announced today during a special event at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris. Introduced by greetings from the Director of the Italian Institute Antonio Calbi, MAXXI President Maria Emanuela Bruni, Fondazione Bvlgari Director Matteo Morbidi and MAXXI Artistic Director Francesco Stocchi illustrated the new edition of the Prize.

In autumn, the site-specific works created specifically for the Prize will be featured in an exhibition at MAXXI curated by Giulia Ferracci. At the end of the exhibition project, the jury will select the winner, whose work will be acquired by the Museum.

MAXXI Bvlgari Prize 2026: Finalists
Chiara Bersani (San Rocco al Porto, Lodi, 1984) is a performer, choreographer and visual artist working across the fields of Performing Arts, experimental theatre and contemporary dance. Her artistic research begins with the concept of the Political Body, highlighting the specific features of her own body as expressive and poetic tools. Her aesthetics are rooted in an experimental ground that restores visibility to the uniqueness of bodies, challenging stereotyped narratives and representations of disability. She has been selected by the jury «for her powerful transformative capacity: her body does not stop at mere presence but becomes voice and space for reflection, turning into a political subject. Gentle Unicorn stands as an emblematic example of the body as an anarchic device, subverting norms of control and aesthetic discipline. Her practice goes beyond testimony, activating a critical space where corporeality becomes a strategy of resistance and a catalyst for community».

Adji Dieye (Milano, 1991) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working between Milan and Dakar. Her research investigates how notions of representation and identity shape the socio-political structures of the contemporary world. Through the analysis of advertising, architecture and national archives, Dieye explores the aesthetics that define ideas of self-determination and collective identity. Photography occupies a central role in her practice, both as a versatile medium and as a critical tool to question processes of representation and othering between Western and non-Western societies. According to the jury: «Her work blurs the sharp lines between documentary and invention, inviting viewers to take an active and responsible approach to the history of her homeland, Senegal. On one hand, she addresses political issues such as decolonisation through layered whispers made up of events excluded or forgotten by history. On the other hand, photography serves as a tool within a broader network of practices that together articulate postcolonial landscapes, memories and silences».

Margherita Moscardini (Livorno, 1981) is interested in the urban, social and natural processes of transformation of certain territories, which inspire her multidimensional works that, through the complicity of law, imagine new ways of inhabiting space. Her practice moves across different fields—architecture, the city, and citizenship—seeking to generate sculptures conceived as objects and inhabitable spaces that distance themselves from the sovereignty of the nation-state on which they physically stand.
The jury stated: «Moscardini’s practice is grounded in a rigorous interweaving of theory and form: her work does not evolve from space itself but interrogates it for its urban, architectural and social meaning. In her interventions, classical models are not merely historical references but conceptual materials to be deconstructed, reassembled and reconsidered in light of the right to inhabit, and the relationships between inside and outside, boundary and openness. Her works reveal how architecture shapes not only the physical landscape but also our perception of self and others».

MAXXI Bvlgari Prize International Jury
The international jury for this edition was composed of Francesco Stocchi, MAXXI Artistic Director; Micol Forti, Head of the Contemporary Art Collection - Vatican Museums and Director at MART in Rovereto; Adam Kleinman, Director and Chief Curator - Kunsthall Trondheim; Beatrix Ruf, Director—Hartwig Art Foundation; Rein Wolfs, Direttore—Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

With the MAXXI Bvlgari Prize the partnership between MAXXI and Fondazione Bvlgari —based on shared values such as excellence, innovation, passion, creativity and experimentation and on an awareness of the importance of support for culture and the strategic role of the public-private alliance—is being renewed and consolidated.