Lost Paintings Project — Brookline Arts Center

The Lost Paintings

The Lost Paintings:
A Prelude to Return

On view Oct 25 — Dec 17, 2025 at Brookline Arts Center

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.

RSVP for the Public Reception & Exhibition Opening on October 25 at 6pm
Full Exhibition Website

Drawing from the minimal information of Tomb's last exhibition in Palestine before his forced exile, the contemporary artists' responses navigate across painting, photography, multimedia, 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 travelling exhibition extends across two venues: Brookline Arts Center and Unbound Visual Arts. .

Works on Display

Through the Olive Trees (Younis)
Noel Maghathe (b. 1994, Cincinnati)Dye-sublimation on synthetic chiffon / 41 in x 26 in / 2024

Homemade Donkey, Homemade Oranges and Homemade Cages, What Else?
Aysha E Arar (b. 1993, Jaljulia)charcoal, ballpoint pen, and pastel on burial shroud / 79 in x 91 in / 2023

The Fire
Benji Boyadgian (b. 1983, Jerusalem) Drawings (2010-2015), video & sound 8:50 min (2024) / variable dimensions

Holy Almonds
Faten Abu Ali (b. 1990, Sakhnin) Video & sound / 5:59 min / 2025

Utopia
Nora Sayyad (b. 1991, Östertälje) Archival inkjet print / 20 in x 16 in / 2023

Deconstruct the House
Ruba Al-Faraouna (b. 1995, Shaqib al-Salam) Video & sound / 3:19 min / 2025

The Olive Tree
Ronen Zien (b. 1990, Shefa'amer) Cyanotype print on cotton paper / 25 in x 35 in / 2025

The Lost Paintings is supported by:

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