Sara Alberani, curator, activist and dear DAI alum 2025, writes to us to share news on the exhibition that just opened in Fondazione Musei Brescia: "This is a significant exhibition, the only one currently presented in a public museum in Italy, and possibly in Europe, focused on the Palestinian context with explicit artistic and political intent. It is also the largest exhibition ever held in Italy of Emily Jacir’s work, alongside that of Mohammed Al Hawajri and Dina Mattar, co-founders of the Eltiqa Group for Contemporary Art in Gaza, which was destroyed by Israeli bombardments in 2023. The exhibition features works brought directly from Gaza, saved by the artists, and presents Dina’s monumental painting, previously shown at the Sharjah Biennial 16. It also includes key pieces such as Material for a Film (Golden Lion, Venice Biennale 2007) and Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages that were Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948, both by Emily Jacir, together with the bullet-pierced book worn by Wael Zuaiter when he was killed by Mossad agents in Rome in 1972." Material for an Exhibition: Stories, Memories and Struggles from Palestine and the Mediterranean with Haig Aivazian ( DAI guest tutor March 2025), Mohammed Al Hawajri, Emily Jacir, Dina Mattar curated by Sara Alberani.
Description:
The show Material for an Exhibition. Stories, Memories and Struggles from Palestine and the Mediterranean offers an insight into the Palestinian context and, more broadly, into the Mediterranean through diverse artistic languages and the works of international artists Haig Aivazian, Mohammed Al-Hawajri, Emily Jacir and Dina Mattar.
Material for an Exhibition, curated by Sara Alberani, pays homage to Emily Jacir’s work Material for a Film, awarded the Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007) and featured in the exhibition. Dedicated to the Palestinian poet and intellectual Wael Zuaiter, active between Palestine and Italy and assassinated by Mossad in Rome in 1972, the work embodies stories at risk of disappearance and violent interruption, like that of the poet himself, who was translating The Thousand and One Nights directly from Arabic into Italian.
This process of translation, mediation, and perseverance runs throughout the exhibition, as suggested by its subtitle Stories, Memories and Struggles from Palestine and the Mediterranean, making visible the ties and solidarities among the geographies of the Mediterranean and addressing the fractures, violence, and attempts at erasure that affect them. “What matters is that this exhibition brings us together. It is profoundly important at this moment. People must not forget that we are one body, one people.” (E. Jacir).
The term Material refers both to artistic creation—installations, video, sculpture, painting, drawings, and works on paper—and to the material conditions in which artists from conflict zones work, often marked by the loss of artworks, archives, and sites of memory. The exhibition thus offers a crucial opportunity to present “works that physically come from Gaza” (M. Al-Hawajri), together with the artists who carried them as a gesture against their destruction.
Ultimately, the exhibition invites reflection on how vital these materials are within the Palestinian context, centering the role of art and the archive as forms of struggle, resistance, and remembrance.
About Sara Alberani
About Haig Aivazian
