This artist has transformed a coffee cup into a story about global power

The words “Memento Vivere” — “remember to live” — emerge embossed against a vivid yellow background. The espresso cup designed by Mohammed Z. Rahman for illy rests on a saucer that, at first glance, appears to depict a rural landscape. Look more closely, however, and the scene takes on a darker tone: bent figures work in the fields while a heavyset man in a suit unbuttons his double-breasted jacket before them. Rather than accompanying coffee’s comforting daily ritual, the work redirects attention to the histories of labor and exploitation embedded within global agricultural supply chains. Since the 1990s, illy has built a legacy of collections that transform the iconic espresso cup designed by Matteo Thun into a miniature artist’s canvas. Over the years, artists such as Jeff Koons, Marina Abramović, and William Kentridge have reimagined its surface, often in dialogue with the themes of the Venice Biennale, which illy has sponsored since 2003.

But this year’s edition feels different. Biennale Arte 2026, titled In Minor Keys and curated by Koyo Kouoh before her death, inevitably engages with political and social tensions that can no longer remain at the margins of contemporary art.

illy, too, appears to have shifted onto more explicitly political ground. The four invited artists — Irish artist Alice Maher, Cameroonian writer and artist Werewere Liking, South African artist Thania Petersen, and Rahman — have transformed “an everyday object like the espresso cup into a space for storytelling, memory, and imagination,” the brand explains.

Rahman’s practice moves across painting, sculpture, and anthropological research, exploring themes such as migration, labor, and diasporic memory. The Memento Vivere espresso cup appears to directly echo “Remember to Live”, the artist’s 2025 solo exhibition at PEER. There, too, Rahman presented a work titled Memento Vivere, dedicated to the memories of the AIDS crisis in the United Kingdom and to the migrant histories of late-1980s industrial London.

It is difficult not to read the illy espresso cup as an implicit reference to the colonial history of plantations and to the origins of coffee itself. Without ever becoming overtly didactic, the work evokes everything usually left outside the polished imagery of the espresso ritual: manual labor, structures of domination, and the economic violence running through global supply chains.

Perhaps this is the most compelling aspect of this year’s collection: a brand that has long associated its visual universe with a harmonious vision of contemporary art now embraces harsher imagery shaped by historical conflict and social tension.