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This travelling exhibition extends across two venues – MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) and articule.
Curated by Rula Khoury, Joëlle Tomb and Haidi Motola, 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.
Guided Tour of the Exhibition With Curator Joëlle Tomb →
articule — September 6th, 1pm to 2pm (English)
Free entry, no reservation required. Doors open at noon.
MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) — September 6th, 3pm to 4pm (French)
Free entry, no reservation required. Doors open at 2pm.
Consult the Arabic version of the artist statement here.
co-presented with
ABOUT+
Rula Khoury is an art curator, historian, and critic, currently based in Haifa. She holds a Master’s degree in Art History from the University of Haifa and a second Master’s in Writing Art Criticism from the School of Visual Arts, New York.
Khoury served as General Director of the Arab Culture Association in Haifa (2020) and, prior to that, as Artistic Director of the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah (2014). In 2014, as part of the Qalandiya International Biennale, she curated the Manam exhibition in Haifa and Mapping Procession, a street-based happening in Ramallah. She was also one of the curators of the Autonomous Biennale (2023, 2025).
Her art criticism has been published in various international magazines, including AWARE, Tohu Magazine, and Tribe Photo Magazine. She has also published two children’s books, one of them in collaboration with the Barjeel Foundation. In addition, Khoury has taught in higher education institutions, offering courses on the history of Palestinian art and the fundamentals of art history.
Her latest project is the establishment of a new art gallery in Jaffa, Al-Mathaneh.
Joëlle Tomb is an abstract painter, art advocate and curator based in Newton, MA. She was born in Lebanon and raised in Saudi Arabia and Canada, where she gained her Master’s in Education. Her grandfather, Maroun Tomb, was a prolific painter and her father Fouad Tomb is a modern Lebanese painter who dedicated his life to arts education. She served as a docent at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston for three years and facilitated various public art projects. She is currently the Board President of the New Art Centre and is on the Advisory board of ARCK (Art Resource Collaborative for Kids) and the Nearby Gallery. She also presides over the Fouad & May Tomb Foundation for the Arts, her family’s international art platform dedicated to preserving the family’s artistic heritage and to promoting art for humanity. Joëlle’s first solo exhibition took place in Newton City Hall (2019), and since then she has participated in several group shows locally and internationally. Her curatorial work includes, Mehswar “A Painter’s Return” (2022) at the Nearby Gallery in Newton, MA; Meshwar of an artist from Palestine to Lebanon: Dialogue between two generations Maroun & Fouad Tomb (2023) at Dar El Nimer for Arts & Culture in Beirut, Lebanon; and Aswat: Elevating Arab Women Voices (2023) at the New Art Center in Newton, MA.
Haidi Motola is a visual artist and a doctoral student at the Academy of Fine Arts of Uniarts Helsinki. Her research focuses on archives, memory and political imagination in the colonial context. Since 2016, she has been a member of Activestills, a collective of documentary photographers, whose work focuses on decolonial struggles in Palestine. Over the years, she has been involved in various art and activist initiatives, including, recently, with Bedouin women living in unrecognized villages in the Naqab.
Credits+
Curators: Rula Khoury, Joëlle Tomb, Haidi Motola
Artists: Noor Abed • Abed Abdi • Hala Abo Freh • Ghassan Yousef Abulaban • Tala Abunuwar • Ruba Al-Faraouna • Dalia Ali • Faten Abu Ali • Ola Alkrenawi • Sama Alshaibi • Aysha E Arar • Doaa Badran • Nasrin Abu Baker • Joanna Bararkat • Jacqueline Béjani • Doris Bittar • Benji Boyadgian • Muhammad Nour Elkhairy • Faissal El-Malak • Ashraf Fawakhry • Michael Halak • Aya Abu Hawash • Iman Jabrah • Raed Issa • Khaled Jarrar • Mado Kelleyan • Juhaina Habibi Kandalaft • Dina Nazmi Khorchid • Bayan Kiwan • Noel Maghathe • Yara Kassem Mahajena • Maria Saleh Mahameed • Souad Naser Makhoul • Sliman Mansour • Sara Mraish • Zohdy Qadry • Antoine Elias Raffoul • Ridikkuluz • Fatima Abu Roomi • Steve Sabella • Razan AlSalah • Nora Sayyad • Farid Abu Shakra • Samah Shihadi • Nardeen Srouji • Dalleh Tarabey • Fouad Tomb • Lorena Tomb • Sandra Tomb • Mary Tuma • Sharif Waked • Ronen Zien • Manar Zuabi
