At Bulgari’s Venice Biennale Show, Young Artists and Historic Treasures Collide

For the first time ever, Bulgari became an official sponsor of the 2026 Venice Biennale, a role that will continue through 2030. Supporting the arts is nothing new to the Roman high jewelry brand—the Fondazione Bulgari was launched in 2024 to officially codify decades of patronage, ranging from the restoration of Rome’s Spanish Steps to partnering with the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The foundation acts as a sort of cultural bridge across time, nurturing new contemporary artists while helping to preserve historical treasures.
The centerpiece of this year’s endeavor is the Bulgari Pavilion, situated within the Giardini exhibition space, where different countries show the work of highlighted artists in designated national pavilions. Here, the Canadian multimedia rising star Lotus L. Kang—whose work suggests atmospheric environments rather than static assemblages—was commissioned to create a site-specific installation, which she titled The Face of Desire Is Loss.
Inspired by Lara Mimosa Montes’ Thresholes, a book of poems exploring emptiness and voids as generative spaces, Kang suspended large sheets of photographic film from perforated steel joists resembling industrial lotus roots. The sheets weren’t treated with the chemical process that preserves images, so they remain sensitive to the world around them; as the sunlight hits them and the air circulates around them, their colors bruise, fade, and shift. The windows of the pavilion are lined with much thinner 35 mm film strips bearing images of tidal mudflats and spectrograms of birdcalls; Kang rounds out the sensory experience with 49 bottles of spirits placed around the space, referencing the number of days that a soul hovers between death and rebirth in Buddhist culture. Instead of a permanent monument, Kang offers an artwork that is continuously evolving.