{"id":428671,"date":"2026-05-06T18:25:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T18:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/428671\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T18:25:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T18:25:11","slug":"at-venice-biennale-arte-bulgari-champions-contemporary-art-and-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/428671\/","title":{"rendered":"At Venice Biennale Arte Bulgari Champions Contemporary Art and Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tVENICE \u2014 Jewels can be considered the first form of art<\/a>, created thousands of years before any art work to celebrate love, observed Jean-Christophe Babin, chief executive officer of Bulgari.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tSpeaking on Wednesday ahead of the official kickoff of the Venice Biennale Arte 2026 on Saturday, Babin said Bulgari<\/a>\u2019s role as exclusive partner of the prestigious and influential contemporary\u00a0art<\/a>\u00a0showcase \u201cis a dream come true and perhaps it can span even longer than 2030.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBulgari<\/a>\u2019s support of the next three editions of the Venice-based event \u2014 running this year, in 2028 and 2030 \u2014 was revealed last year.<\/a> Titled \u201cIn Minor Keys,\u201d this year\u2019s event was curated by the late Cameroonian-Swiss art<\/a> curator Koyo Kouoh, who died suddenly in May 2025, and is staged at the city\u2019s Giardini and Arsenale venues, as well as in various locations around the Lagoon.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe executive said the Rome-based jeweler was \u201cproud to contribute to the creation of a dynamic and inspiring environment in which visitors, artists and curators can come together, be creative, engage in dialogue, experiment freely, and collectively imagine and shape the culture of the future. It reflects Bulgari\u2019s dedication to perpetuate art and beauty for an increasingly wider audience.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBy crafting unique masterpieces every day, with gold and gems that are forever, we feel protagonists of the art world,\u201d said Babin.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe partnership with the Biennale \u201crepresents a natural extension of Bulgari\u2019s long-standing and continuously strengthening commitment to the arts, continuously strengthened over the years,\u201d said Babin, underscoring the continuity of investments, even during the pandemic.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cA lot of things can be done by animals. A lot of things can be done by artificial intelligence, but arts can be only done by men and women, by human beings. And this is what makes the difference between mankind and technological instruments,\u201d continued Babin. \u201cSo that\u2019s why we are so keen to promote our [creations], as permanent reinventions or inventions of things that even a machine couldn\u2019t imagine.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBabin also enthused about a collaboration between \u201ctwo Italian excellences, with more than a century of history,\u201d referring to Bulgari\u2019s foundation in 1884, followed by the Venice Biennale, which was created in 1895.<\/p>\n

\n\tBulgari inaugurated the Biennale partnership with two art initiatives in Venice: The exhibition by the Canadian artist Lotus L. Kang in the Bulgari Pavilion, and the first exhibition of Fondazione Bulgari staged at the Biblioteca Marciana with site-specific installations by Lara Favaretto, \u201cMomentary Monument \u2014 the Library,\u201d and by Monia Ben Hamouda, \u201cFragments of Fire Worship.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe latter artist is the winner of the biennial prize established in 2017 by Bulgari in collaboration with MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts, now carried forward by Fondazione Bulgari. The foundation is also presenting her sculpture \u201cYa\u2019aburnee (\u064a\u0642\u0628\u0631\u0646\u064a ) \u2014 (Untranslated Fragment I and II)\u201d in the garden of the Bulgari Hotel in Milan, which will remain in place for the duration of the Biennale Arte 2026, which closes Nov. 22.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tLara Favaretto\u2019s installation \u201cMomentary Monument \u2014 the Library\u201d at the Biblioteca Marciana.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\trui_ t-space studio<\/p>\n

\n\tFavaretto is the recipient of the Prize for Young Italian Art 2004-2005, with a work for MAXXI that was presented at the Biennale Arte in 2005.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe MAXXI Bulgari Prize will mark its 10th edition in 2027. Fondazione Bulgari in 2024 also inked a partnership with the Whitney Biennial.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt the Bulgari Pavilion, Kang\u2019s installation,\u201dThe face of desire is loss,\u201d continues her enduring engagement with time as unruly and nonlinear.<\/p>\n

\n\tThroughout the pavilion, lengths of photographic film are suspended from steel joists whose structure echoes that of the lotus root. Named \u201cskins\u201d by the artist, the film will morph over the months, exposed to the light and the humidity of the location. Kang also installed a series of new sculptural works, rendered from tatami mats and cast objects, and she encased the windows with lengths of 35mm film celluloid strips. Around the perimeter of the installation, the artist placed 49 bottles of spirits, a nod to the number of days a soul hovers between death and rebirth in Buddhism.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIn this context it\u2019s exceptional that an event that has such a global impact has only one exclusive partner,\u201d said Babin, praising the organizing body\u2019s decision to stay away from exploiting commercial avenues.<\/p>\n

\n\tLikewise, he praised both the brand\u2019s parent LVMH Mo\u00ebt Hennessy Louis Vuitton and the Bulgari founding family for \u201cnever hesitating, even when the company was very small, to find resources\u201d to champion the arts, supporting for example the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tMonia Ben Hamouda\u2019s \u00a0\u201cFragments of Fire Worship.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\trui_ t-space studio<\/p>\n

\n\tThere is no doubt Bulgari has invested in antique and contemporary art for years, restoring storied landmarks and supporting Save the Children, among other charities. For example, Bulgari contributed to the restoration of the 16th-century Scala d\u2019Oro at the Doge\u2019s Palace in Venice, called Golden Staircase for its stuccoes in gold leaves, \u00a0and the paintings by Paolo Veronese in the church of San Pietro Martire in Murano. In the Italian capital, Bulgari restored the Spanish Steps, the polychrome floor mosaics of the Baths of Caracalla and the marbles of the Torlonia Collection.<\/p>\n

\n\tBulgari will open a new goldsmith school in Rome in September and Babin said he had high hopes of \u201cmaking the city the capital of high jewelry<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAlso, while the Museum of the Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome near the Bulgari Hotel isn\u2019t expected to open until 2028, the gardens surrounding the site will open in June, said Babin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"VENICE \u2014 Jewels can be considered the first form of art, created thousands of years before any art…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":428672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[787,47240,146,85,46,28631],"class_list":["post-428671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-art","tag-bulgari","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-jewelry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/428672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}