A group of artists have withdrawn their work from an exhibition at one of Italy’s top contemporary art museums, citing the institution’s alleged “links to genocide in Palestine,” ahead of the show’s opening this week.

The seven artists—Tania Bruguera, Dora Garcia, Phil Collins and Siniša Mitrović, Alessandra Saviotti, and Gemma Medina—were to be featured in the highly anticipated exhibition “1+1: The Relational Years,” which is set to open at MAXXI in Rome today. The show, which also features the work of Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pierre Huyghe, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, is set to survey relational aesthetics, which was first theorized as a movement in 1998 by Nicolas Bourriaud, who serves as the exhibition’s curator.

In an open letter published on the website of Nero Editions, a publishing house focused on artist’s books and museum catalogs, the artists write, “we have become aware of MAXXI’s stance on the ongoing genocide in Gaza and on the brutal occupation of Palestine, evidenced through its acceptance of funding from and recent collaborations with Eni, Leonardo s.p.a. and other entities directly complicit in these atrocities.”

Both Leonardo and Eni are Italian companies that have ties to...