A new exhibition in Turin, Italy is bringing ancient artefacts from Palestine into dialogue with contemporary works by Levantine artists, in an effort to draw attention to the need to protect Palestinian history and heritage.
Titled Gaza, The Future Has an Ancient Heart, the show at Fondazione Merz has been assembled by a team from Merz Foundation, Egizio archaeology museum and the MAH – Museum of Art and History Geneva.
“With what has been happening in Gaza over the last two years, we felt we had to do something, and as an arts museum, we can do our job,” co-curator and Fondazione Merz founder Beatrice Merz tells The National.
“We found out about these artefacts in Geneva and thought we should highlight them, add comprehension to them and about the situation in Gaza for the public here in Italy.
“As a contemporary art museum, we also felt it was necessary to draw the relation between the contemporary and antiquity, so we selected artists from the Levant who all have a research-driven approach, or deal with archaeology, history and memory,” she adds. “The works are spread throughout the exhibition, and really go hand in hand with the artefacts.”
The exhibition presents more than 80 archaeological objects from MAH – Museum of Art and History Geneva, where they are held on behalf of the state of Palestine, as well as from the Egizio museum in Turin.
Dating from the Bronze Age to the Ottoman period, the objects are part of a 500-piece collection temporarily held at MAH. They were originally intended for the creation of an archaeological museum in Palestine, a project that remains unrealised because of conflict. First loaned in 2007 for a major exhibition at MAH, the pieces were not returned to Palestine due to concerns about their safety and other complications.
Contemporary works by Mirna Bamieh, Samaa Emad, Khalil Rabah, Vivien Sansour, Wael Shawky, Dima Srouji and Akram Zaatari bring those histories into the present. The exhibition also includes photographs of Gaza drawn from the Unrwa archive.
Spread across four thematic chapters, the show presents Gaza as an ancient crossroads of trade, cultures and beliefs. It explores cultural ties between Gaza and other regions, particularly Egypt and Greece, using the artefacts to trace a long history of exchange.
In one section, domestic objects such as a pestle used to grind food, spices or medicinal ingredients are shown alongside Palestinian artist Emad’s Genocide Kitchen. Begun while Emad was in Gaza, the project has continued since she left for Paris six months ago.
The series of 17 collages documents recipes created or adapted during the Israeli war on Gaza over the past two years. Presented in a scrapbook style, the work examines how Gazans have continued to prepare meals amid starvation, shortages, the destruction of bakeries, and restrictions on food and aid supplies.
“We had no cooking gas and many food supplies, especially flour, were hard to find, so it was hard to prepare a meal for each day. It was a collective experience and I felt the need to document it, because between the killing, bombing and displacement, these little details can be forgotten,” Emad says.
“I started collecting recipes that people invented to be alternatives to the original recipes, replacing ingredients like flour with bird seed, or eating weeds like milk thistle.
“Everyone around me got so creative, refusing to just starve, and I felt it should be shared,” she adds. “These are the crimes between the big events and headlines. I’m working to have it all compiled in one book when I’m finished.”
Another series by Emad, Reimagining Homeland, is also on show. Through collaged archival images, the work attempts to reconstruct destroyed Palestinian villages remembered through stories passed down by parents and grandparents.
Elsewhere, Srouji’s Phantom Votives presents beeswax casts of body parts, including fragments of hands, feet and torsos. The work appears in a section devoted to ritual and religious exchange, from the worship of Astarte, Baal and Aphrodite to the coexistence of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Marked with the number of days that have passed since the start of the war, during which they were sculpted, the pieces hang from the ceiling like votive offerings.
Zaatari’s works consider displaced heritage and the role of photography as a record of lives, places and histories often lost or taken during conflict.
His video On Photography, Dispossession and Times of Struggle explores how photographs can become one of the few remaining records of displacement. Also on show is his photographic series An Extraordinary Event, which looks at the excavation of the Sidon Necropolis.
“It represents at once a search for photographs, a research on photography in modern times and a story of displacement of thousands of photographs from private, sometimes intimate, spaces in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, into the archive of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut,” says Zaatari. “The film is based on rushes that I videotaped myself while doing my research on photography between 1998 and 2000.
“An Extraordinary Event is based on the excavation of the Sidon Necropolis in 1887 by Osman Hamdi Bey, when 17 sarcophagi were extracted and temporarily displayed in a citrus grove before being transported to Constantinople.
“Hamdi Bey took photographs of the finds, which became part of the Sultan Abdul-Hamid albums, documenting aspects of modern life in the empire, including archaeology. He was primarily interested in photographing the objects, but did not mind the presence of people, which often gave the images scale.
“The work plays with these two presences: on one hand the finds, unearthed after 2,000 years spent in the dark and now barely visible; on the other, the people, the citrus trees, and the surrounding landscape, all witnessing – perhaps for the first time – the presence of a camera.”
By placing ancient objects beside works made in response to displacement, hunger, memory and loss, Gaza, The Future Has an Ancient Heart argues for Palestinian culture as something both historic and living. The exhibition’s central idea is that heritage is not only preserved in archaeological collections, but also in recipes, images, stories and the artistic record of the present.
Gaza, The Future Has an Ancient Heart is on show until September 27, 2026, at Fondazione Merz in Turin, Italy.
