A group exhibition presents, through works by artists from Gaza to Lebanon

Material for an Exhibition: Stories, Memories and Struggles of Palestine and the Mediterranean
At the Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia, a group exhibition presents, through works by artists from Gaza to Lebanon, the power of art as a tool for memory, solidarity and resistance.

3/11/2025 - From November 8, 2025 to February 22, 2026, the Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia hosts Material for an Exhibition: Stories, Memories and Struggles of Palestine and the Mediterranean, an exhibition that brings together works by artists from territories marked by conflict and migration.

Curated by Sara Alberani and promoted by the Municipality of Brescia and the Brescia Museums Foundation, the exhibition is one of the most anticipated events of the eighth edition of the Peace Festival.

The project stems from the idea of revitalizing the Eltiqa Group of Contemporary Art, a historic art space in Gaza destroyed in 2023, by exhibiting some works that survived the bombing. Participating in this ideal reconstruction are the co-founders of the collective, Mohammed Al-Hawajri and Dina Mattar, along with Lebanese artist Haig Aivazian and Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, winner of the Golden Lion at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

The exhibition's title, which pays homage to Emily Jacir's work "Material for a Film," evokes the plurality of expressive languages—installations, video, photography, painting, and drawing—as well as the material conditions in which many artists work, often marked by the loss of archives, works, and places of memory.

The exhibition aims to overcome the victimization/criminalization dichotomy in the narrative of Palestine and the Mediterranean, emphasizing the value of art as a means of building bonds of solidarity and imagining alternatives to conflict.

The exhibition opens with paintings and drawings by Al-Hawajri and Mattar, co-founders of Eltiqa, who narrate the daily life and resilience of Gaza through intimate and poetic images.

Al-Hawajri intertwines historical memory and everyday life, transforming the pain of occupation into symbolic and ironic narratives, while Mattar uses painting as an instrument of joy and resistance, populating his canvases with vibrant female figures and domestic scenes.

Following this, the work of Haig Aivazian, a Lebanese artist whose research explores power structures and control mechanisms in contemporary societies, is presented. Among the works on display are All of the Lights (2021), an immersive video installation about the use of light as a surveillance tool, and 1440 Couchers de Soleil par 24 Heures (2017/2021), which reproduces heat maps of human movement through a luminous design on the museum walls.

The exhibition concludes with Emily Jacir, one of the most influential voices in contemporary Palestinian art, presenting works that intertwine memory, exile, and belonging.

Among them are Material for a Film (2005–ongoing), an installation composed of a thousand blank books riddled with bullets, a symbol of violence against culture and memory, and Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages (2021), a large embroidered curtain that brings back to life Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948.
Also on display is We Ate the Wind (2023), presented for the first time in Italy, which brings together stories of migration from southern Italy and Palestine, linked by a common Mediterranean culture.

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