Lotus L. Kang, Monia Ben Hamouda and Lara Favaretto
May 9–November 22, 2026
Bvlgari Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale
Lotus L. Kang: The Face of Desire is Loss
Fondazione Bvlgari—Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Piazza San Marco 13
Monia Ben Hamouda: Fragments Of Fire Worship
Lara Favaretto: Momentary Monument—The Library
Bvlgari inaugurates its role as the Exclusive Partner of the Venice Biennale until 2030. This significant commitment solidifies the Maison's strong and enduring bond with art, cultivated over years by promoting creativity as an expression of freedom, fostering cultural dialogue, and driving innovation. A further expression of Bvlgari’s dedication to perpetuate art and beauty for an ever-wider audience.
Two special initiatives mark the brand’s debut in the 2026 edition. The Bvlgari Pavilion within the Giardini della Biennale hosts a new project by Canadian artist Lotus L. Kang, while Fondazione Bvlgari presents its first exhibition at Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana featuring two Italian artists, Lara Favaretto and Monia Ben Hamouda.
Lotus L. Kang at the Bvlgari Pavilion
In The Face of Desire is Loss, the Toronto-born, New York-based artist deepens her engagement with time and the body as uncontainable forms—unruly, sedimentary and nonlinear.
The exhibition draws its title from Lara Mimosa Montes’ Thresholes (2020), a book of poems that gives expansive language to emptiness as form, to holes and voids as generative spaces. Lengths of unfixed photographic film anchor the Pavilion, suspended from steel joists whose structure echoes that of the lotus root. Termed ‘skins’ by the artist, the film remains continuously sensitive to its environment for the duration of the Biennale, its palette of bodily hues developing in response to the light and humidity of the space over the project’s run.
Above the joists, Kang suspends a suite of sculptures that use tatami mats as their foundation, mattresses that are both vessels and accretive forms, containers for the body in threshold states—resting, dreaming, recovering, expiring—and objects sedimenting traces of the time, spaces and bodies they’ve endured. Inverting up/down, floor/ceiling, under/above, these works elude rootedness and resolution, ever in a state of in-between.
A 35mm film work is installed across the windows of the Pavilion, imaged with tidal mudflats—transitional zones where marine and coastal ecosystems meet, merge and overlap—and spectrograms that translate the sounds of crying fledglings and the call of the spoon-billed sandpiper into visual form. Captured in Jeolla, South Korea, the celluloid disperses the film’s duration into a flat, simultaneous plane, as spots choreographed to a score recalling the meter of Kim Hyesoon’s poem Already (2018) cast interstitial light throughout the space.
Around the perimeter of the installation, the artist places 49 bottles of spirits, a nod to the number of days a soul hovers between death and rebirth in Buddhist thought. An open rectilinear structure full of holes sits at the rear of the exhibition. A fleshy pink silicone lines its base with a single thread strung overhead—a fragile delineation, one that shifts endlessly as air and bodies circulate through the Pavilion.
Fondazione Bvlgari at Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana with Monia Ben Hamouda and Lara Favaretto
For the first exhibition promoted by Fondazione Bvlgari, the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana—a venue that symbolizes the preservation and transmission of knowledge—hosts two site-specific installations that engage in dialogue with the Library’s heritage. Monia Ben Hamouda, in the Vestibule spaces, with Fragments of Fire Worship, and Lara Favaretto, in the Salone Sansovino, with the final chapter of Momentary Monument—The Library.
Fragments of Fire Worship by Monia Ben Hamouda opens the exhibition in the Vestibule spaces: an installation composed of two neon sculptures proposing a form of resistance that is not monumental. It does not preserve, but exhibits; it does not file things away but lets them filter through. Fragmented and indecipherable luminous signs evoke a form of writing that has relinquished its communicative function to become a gesture, a trace, a scar. Daughter of an Islamic calligrapher, the artist transforms her cultural heritage into an impossible alphabet in which light does not clarify but withholds. Neon evokes fire as an ambivalent force of both revelation and destruction, introducing a vision of knowledge as an unstable material subject to constant metamorphosis. In an exercise of formal disobedience, the work undermines the idea of language as a tool for the univocal transmission of knowledge.
The elements of which it is composed look like the active remains of a broken form of writing, luminous presences that resist the imposition of translation and clarity. Set in a space historically dedicated to the preservation of knowledge, the work does not celebrate its authority but fractures it. In a place founded on order, cataloguing and transmission, these opaque signs render visible that which archives tend to eliminate: selection, exclusion, loss. It is impossible to preserve everything that exists, or to read everything that is preserved. Fragments of Fire Worship acts in this area of attrition, where knowledge ceases to be neutral and reveals its exposure to risk.
Momentary Monument—The Library by Lara Favaretto brings together books from university libraries, scientific societies, academies, archives, and private collections. Each volume is intersected by an image from Lara Favaretto’s personal archive, inserted randomly among the pages as a singular, non-illustrative presence.
Through processes of collection, selection, and recontextualization, the project creates a dialogue between preservation and circulation, disciplinary knowledge, and visual grafts, giving form to a transitory structure in which the book functions simultaneously as document, material trace, and vehicle of transmission. The selection reveals the tools, methods, and lexicons of different fields—extending beyond monographs to include proceedings, manuals, and hybrid formats. Many of these volumes bear marks of ownership and annotations, tracing their provenance, accumulation over time, and gradual obsolescence.
The work reflects on the material value of the printed book and on the vulnerability of systems of memory and knowledge transmission—not in opposition to the digital, but by recognizing how direct consultation preserves a form of opacity, autonomy, and verifiability, made evident in the marks inscribed on each volume. When the book encounters the image, reading is displaced, opening a relation between distinct regimes of recording and transmission, and turning each volume into an unstable correspondence.
Visitors are invited to consult and take the books, becoming their custodians and activating a per formative dimension that progressively alters the shelving, making its emptying visible. What first appears as a compact, monolithic ensemble is reconfigured as a structure marked by dispersion and transit, where subtraction does not signify loss but the trace of circulation—knowledge reactivated and entrusted to new forms of use and transmission.
