THEto 61st International Art Exhibition – The Venice Biennale it was officially inaugurated yesterday, with a view to opening to the public on May 9th. This edition will feature the maison for the first time Bulgari as Exclusive Partner of the Venice Art Biennalea role that will be renewed for three editions until 2030.
Bulgari and the 2026 Art Biennale
This commitment, which underlines and strengthens the maison’s link with art and creativity as an expression of freedom, will be realized immediately with two special moments: on the one hand the project by Lotus L. Kang at the Bvlgari Pavilion in the Esedra Space of the Gardens and on the other, as part of the collateral events, the first exhibition promoted by the Bvlgari Foundation which brings together two brings together two site-specific interventions by Lara Favaretto and Monia Ben Hamouda at the Marciana National Library.
Lotus L. Kang in the Bvlgari Pavilion
Immense unfixed films, they hang from beams that resemble the hearts of lotus flowers. On the walls, kilometers of cinematographic film filter the light of the lagoon. Here and there 49 bottles placed against the wallsi (in Buddhism the number 49 is given by seven times seven days, it represents the completion of a profound cycle or a spiritual transformation) and small unexpected architectural objects emerge from the ceiling.
Lotus L. Kang’s works return in poetic form reflections on themes that include inheritance, transience, memory and transposition. Working fluidly between sculpture, photography and site-responsive installationsKang’s work often draws on unfixed and unstable materials and forms, such as photographic films that continue to remain sensitive to their surroundings and sedimentary sculptures that refuse rootedness and completeness, always in a state of in-betweenness.
Lotus L. Kang. Photo © Carolyne Loreé Teston. (Photo: Courtesy Bvlgari)
For Biennale Arte 2026, Kang developed an installation, specially conceived for Bvlgari in the Maison’s Pavilion to the Esedra Space of the Gardens, in continuity with its constant relationship with time, understood as multiple, non-linear and contingent, giving broad development to the theme of “becoming”.
Bvlgari Foundation for Lara Favaretto and Monia Ben Hamouda
Housed in the Monumental Halls of Marciana National Librarya symbolic place for the custody and transmission of knowledge, the exhibition project brings together two site-specific interventions: Momentary Monument – The Library by Lara Favaretto e Fragments of Fire Worship by Monia Ben Hamouda.
Opening the exhibition itinerary is Fragments of Fire Worship by Monia Ben Hamoudaan installation composed of two neon sculptures located in the Vestibule which they evoke fire and the sacred.
Daughter of an Islamic calligrapher, lThe artist transforms his own cultural heritage into an impossible alphabet, in which light does not clarify but holds. Neon evokes fire as an ambivalent force of revelation and destruction, introducing a vision of knowledge as unstable matter, subjected to continuous metamorphoses. Through an exercise in formal disobedience, the work undermines the idea of language as a tool for the univocal transmission of knowledge.
Bulgari’s collaboration with Monia Ben Hamouda includes a further intervention in Milan, where her sculpture Ya’aburnee (Untranslated Fragment I) was installed in the garden of Bvlgari Hotel Milan on April 27th and will remain visible for the entire duration of the 2026 Biennale Arte.
Fragments of Fire Worships. Photo credit T-Space
In the Sansovino Salon, Lara Favaretto presents the seventh and final edition of Momentary Monument – The Libraryusing books as an epistemic infrastructure and as a critical space of transmission. The project takes shape through a dialogue with libraries of universities and national institutes, academies and private collections, which contributed with donations of volumes subsequently subjected to reconnaissance and selection work: an in-depth study aimed at restoring the plurality of knowledge practices and their documentary consistency. This selection is shown in a monolithic shelving, conceived as an exhibition device inviting the public to consult.
Monumentary Library. Photo Credit T-Space
The choice does not follow criteria of rarity or prestige, but documentary stability and content density, so that even specialized or apparently obsolete texts continue to function as readable traces of the conditions of production and transmission of knowledge. Each volume is associated with a different image, taken from the artist’s personal archive, active since 1995: a visual graft that connects them through slips, frictions and resonances, composing an analogue hypertext based on serendipity.
During the exhibition, the library takes the form of a device in transformation, which brings into play the very idea of conservation and exposes it to processes of circulation and redistribution. In dialogue with the institution and with space, Favaretto questions knowledge in the age of digitalisation, putting access and evidence, memory and dispersion, visibility and shared responsibility in tension. The project will result in an artist publication.
From the opening on Saturday 9 May, all participants will be able to interact with the books and even take one away if they want.