The politically charged and culturally rich exhibition opened on 15 February, 2025 and runs for a month to 15 March 2025. [Joseph Chirume]
An art exhibition exploring the devastation and resilience of Gaza has opened in Cape Town, amid growing solidarity between South Africa and Palestine.
Titled Gaza Remains the Story, the exhibition is currently on display at the District Six Museum Homecoming Centre. It offers a detailed exploration of the war in Gaza but also the region’s history, culture, and artistic traditions.
The exhibition is a collaboration between The Palestinian Museum in the West Bank and the District Six Museum in South Africa, with support from the Cultural Solidarity Collective—an informal group of Cape Town-based artists, curators, writers, designers, urban practitioners, and activists working to bring Palestinian narratives to a global audience.
Running from 15 February to 15 March 2025, the exhibition presents a politically charged and culturally rich account of Gaza’s past and present.
Amer Shomali, Director General of The Palestinian Museum, says the Israeli military campaign has targeted key cultural landmarks, erasing centuries of Palestinian history.
Speaking to The New Arab, he explained: “More than 200 archaeological sites, seven museums, two art galleries, three cultural institutions, and two archives have been damaged or destroyed since 7 October 2023. Beyond these physical losses, cultural professionals have also been targeted—at least 44 individuals in the arts, culture, and heritage sectors were martyred during the genocide in Gaza.”
The destruction, he says, is not just physical but also an attack on Palestinian identity.
Divided into several sections, Gaza Remains the Story offers a structured yet deeply emotional narrative of Palestine’s history, culture, and resistance.
The first section, Historical Context, explores Gaza’s geography and centuries-old history, tracing its deep-rooted significance in the region. Visitors are guided through maps, archival images, and historical texts that set the foundation for understanding Gaza’s enduring struggle.
The second section, dedicated to Wars and Conflicts, documents the major turning points in Palestinian history, from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to the Nakba of 1948, the two Intifadas, and the repeated Israeli military offensives since 2000, culminating in the current war. It presents a sobering timeline of destruction but also of resistance.
In contrast, the Arts and Culture section highlights the resilience of Gaza’s people through music, poetry, painting, and crafts—demonstrating how cultural heritage has become a form of defiance against occupation.
The final section, International Solidarity, examines the global movements that have supported Palestine since the 1920s. It critiques international law’s failure to hold Israel accountable while showcasing activism that has grown over the decades.
Central to this is the role of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which calls for a complete severance of trade and institutional ties with what it describes as Apartheid Israel.
For the organisers, the exhibition is not just about history—it is about preserving a narrative that has long been under threat.
Sura Abualrob, Media and Marketing Coordinator at The Palestinian Museum, describes the exhibition’s deep connection to the District Six Museum.
“While the District Six Museum is dedicated to commemorating the memory of the 60,000 residents forcibly removed from their neighbourhood under the apartheid regime, our work at The Palestinian Museum is an act of ongoing resistance against systematic violence, suppression, and attempts to silence, distort, and even confiscate our narrative,” she told TNA.
“Art plays a critical role in a colonised nation where our most powerful tools are memory and imagination. It allows us to reimagine and rethink our past and present and envision our future. Art is an essential part of cultural resistance… it is a powerful tool to motivate and mobilise people.”
For many in South Africa, the themes of displacement and oppression in Gaza echo their own history. Mandy Sanger, Head of Education at the District Six Museum, sees Gaza Remains the Story as an opportunity for reflection.
“The exhibition reminds us that Palestinians are not just victims but human beings with a long history of culture, continuous connections to the land, and people with agency—the ability to make independent decisions about how they wish to exist and resist oppression,” she told TNA.
She also drew direct comparisons between the histories of Palestine and South Africa. “Both countries experienced enforced segregation from 1948, when a white Christian nationalist government (inspired by Nazism) came to power in South Africa, while British-mandated Israeli occupation led to the first contemporary Nakba in Palestine.”
“South Africans with a historical consciousness recognise these patterns of settler colonial oppression, and the stories of ordinary Palestinians resonate deeply with us,” Sanger added. For Sanger, Gaza Remains the Story is thus more than an exhibition—it is a conversation starter. “It provides South Africans with an entry point into essential discussions about our unfinished revolution and the ongoing struggles against evictions, homelessness, inequality, and gentrification. This allows us to work on strengthening our local political space through active citizenship, popular education, cultural work, and community engagement.”
For artist and Cultural Solidarity Collective member Roomaan Leach, the parallels between apartheid-era South Africa and present-day Palestine are indeed inescapable. He sees them not only in the political landscape but in the very architecture of dispossession.
He points to former US President Donald Trump’s proposal to forcibly relocate Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan as a chilling reminder of apartheid’s legacy. “As South Africans, we carry with us the painful legacy of forced removals. The Group Areas Act of 1950 tore apart our communities, devastating not just physical spaces but cultural identities and social bonds. It’s visible in the architecture of our cities, in the invisible boundaries that still shape movement, and in the stories our elders tell of the homes they can never return to. It lives in our bodies—in how we navigate spaces. How then, could we agree to consign generations of Palestinians to the same fate?”
For Leach, the role of artists is clear: to bear witness, to refuse erasure, and to ensure that forced displacement is understood as more than just a policy or a headline.
“As artists, we bear a unique responsibility to hold these histories with care. This work serves as both archive and witness. To bear living testimony. To transform the sterile language of ‘forced displacement’ into a reckoning with the despair of families who watch their homes disappear beneath the tracks of a bulldozer, or a child’s heartbreak at losing the only home they have ever known.”
