The Lost Paintings: A Prelude to Return will be presented at Unbound Visual Arts and The Brookline Arts Center. It is also presented in partnership with the Boston Palestine Film Festival.

This exhibition gathers 53 artists from Palestine and its diaspora across time and borders to reimagine the missing works of Maroun Tomb, a Palestinian-Lebanese artist, whose 1947 exhibition in Haifa was lost amid the mass displacement and dispossession of the Palestinians during the Nakba. The works resurrect a moment that was nearly erased until it was discovered in archival documents.

Drawing from the minimal information of Tomb’s last exhibition in Palestine before his forced exile, the contemporary artists’ responses navigate across painting, photography, multi-media, sculpture and video to move between what was and what could be. They do not reconstruct the past, but reclaim it—through fragments, gestures, and stories passed across generations. Bringing together today’s rising artists alongside the trailblazers of Palestinian modern art, this exhibition is a collective act of resistance paired with interrogation of colonial violence and its consequences on multiple generations.

From Haifa to Gaza, landscapes are revisited not as backgrounds, but as living witnesses; still life is rendered unstable, objects and places teetering between presence and disappearance. Archival fragments reemerge as portals, where loss is neither resolved nor concealed but held, examined, and reimagined. Rather than reconstruct the past, the exhibition inhabits the void—where what is absent does not vanish, but stands determined. In this space, memory becomes an act of return, not to what was, but to what still calls.

This traveling exhibition spans two Boston venues—the Brookline Arts Center and Unbound Visual Arts—and is presented in partnership with the Boston Palestine Film Festival. It is produced with the support from the Kone Foundation, the Fouad & May Tomb Foundation for the Arts, the Mass Cultural Council, and private donors.