Art as a driver of social and political change: this is the idea behind the exhibition project, entitled Material for an Exhibition. Stories, memories, and struggles from Palestine and the Mediterranean, scheduled from November 8, 2025, to February 22, 2026, at the Museum of Santa Giulia in Brescia.

The exhibition, curated by Sara Alberani and promoted by the Municipality of Brescia and the Brescia Museums Foundation, brings together works by artists from conflict zones, particularly from the Middle Eastern region now marked by divisions and fragmentations – from Gaza to the West Bank to Lebanon – who have experienced firsthand the daily life of war and exile. Bringing their artistic and cultural testimony are the international Palestinian artists Mohammed Al-Hawajri, Dina Mattar, and Emily Jacir (Golden Lion in Venice in 2007) and the Lebanese artist Haig Aivazian.

The title, Material for an Exhibition, pays homage to Emily Jacir's work Material for a Film and evokes the plurality of languages – installations, videos, photographs, paintings, drawings – that converge in the exhibition, but also the difficult material conditions in which many artists work, often marked by the loss of works, archives, places of memory, and stories passed down by those who are no longer here. In Palestine, the very notion of an archive today represents a tool to continue to exist and resist.

The exhibition offers a vision that goes beyond the victimization/criminalization dichotomy in which the public discourse around the Palestinian cause and, more generally, the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean context risks crystallizing, and aims to emphasize the value of art as a means to defend and consolidate bonds of solidarity among the different geographies of the Mediterranean, opening spaces for learning and dialogue where it is possible to imagine different alternatives to scenarios of war.