Walking into GAZA, the future has an ancient heart. Materials and memories of the Mediterranean at Fondazione Merz feels less like entering an exhibition and more like stepping into layers of time. Hidden behind heavy velvet curtains and unfolding across rooms filled with artefacts, film, sculpture and archival works, the exhibition offers a powerful meditation on Gaza — not only as a place marked by destruction, but as a land deeply rooted in history, culture and memory.

Bringing together over 80 historical artefacts alongside works by contemporary artists, the exhibition reclaims Gaza’s identity as a centuries-old crossroads of civilizations. Long before today’s political realities, Gaza stood at the heart of Mediterranean trade routes, where cultures, beliefs and traditions continuously met and evolved.

One of the exhibition’s strongest openings comes through Wael Shawky’s The Secrets of Karbala, a visually striking marionette film that revisits key moments in Islamic and regional history. The work immediately sets the tone: history here is not distant — it is alive, cyclical and deeply connected to the present.

Throughout the exhibition, that dialogue between past and present remains constant. In Reimagining Homeland, Samaa Emad reconstructs fragments of pre-1948 Palestine through layered collages, reviving erased villages and lost landscapes. Nearby, Khalil Rabah transforms maps into fragile keepsakes, allowing visitors to physically take pieces of memory with them.

What makes this exhibition so compelling is its refusal to isolate Gaza in history. Instead, it insists on seeing Gaza as both ancient and contemporary — a place where inherited memory and current suffering exist side by side. This tension reaches its most haunting point in Dima Srouji’s Phantom Votives, where suspended wax body fragments blur the line between archaeological relic and present-day violence.

Yet amid the heaviness, there is resilience. Through food, photography and seeds, artists like Mirna Bamieh, Akram Zaatari and Vivien Sansour remind us that heritage survives in everyday acts — in recipes passed through generations, in family archives, and in seeds carried across borders.

More than an exhibition, GAZA, the future has an ancient heart becomes an act of remembrance and resistance. It asks an essential question: how do we preserve the soul of a place while it is still under threat? The answer, perhaps, lies in what this exhibition does so well — holding space for memory, for grief, and for the certainty that Gaza’s story is far from over.