CURATORIAL STATEMENT
This project started with the aim of highlighting the ongoing Nakba in Palestine, focusing on the cultural erasure and destruction, and to resist it by means of art. In the horror of witnessing the genocidal war on Gaza and the tens of thousands of lost lives, the countless people doomed to become refugees for the second, third, or more time, we are both overcome by a debilitating sense of futility in the face of the inconceivable death and destruction, countered by the momentous urgency of connecting the dots between the silenced past and the present.
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Joëlle Tomb
Joëlle Tomb is an abstract painter, art advocate, and curator based in Newton, Massachusetts. Born in Lebanon and raised in Saudi Arabia and Canada, she earned her Master’s degree in Education before turning her focus to the arts.
Art runs deep in her family: her grandfather, Maroun Tomb, was a Lebanese-Palestinian painter, and her father, Fouad Tomb, is a modern Lebanese artist who dedicated his life to arts education. Joëlle’s own practice and curatorial work continue this multigenerational legacy.
She served as a docent at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Boston for three years and has facilitated numerous public art initiatives. Joëlle is the former Board President of the New Art Center and an honorary trustee of the Art Resource Collaborative for Kids (ARCK).
In 2020, she co-founded the Fouad & May Tomb Foundation for the Arts, an international platform dedicated to preserving her family’s artistic heritage and promoting art as a force for humanity. In 2024, she established The Lost Paintings, Inc., a 501(c)(3) organization that unites international curators and cultural producers to uncover and share the untold stories behind art from around the world.
Joëlle’s first solo exhibition took place at Newton City Hall in 2019. Since then, she has participated in numerous group exhibitions both locally and internationally. Her curatorial projects include:
• Mehswar: A Painter’s Return (2022), Nearby Gallery, Newton, MA
• Meshwar of an Artist from Palestine to Lebanon: Dialogue Between Two Generations, Maroun & Fouad Tomb (2023), Dar El-Nimer for Arts and Culture, Beirut, Lebanon
• Aswat: Elevating Arab Women’s Voices (2023), New Art Center, Newton, MA
When she is not following her passion for the arts, Joëlle works in luxury residential real estate, helping clients find homes that reflect their unique stories and lifestyles.
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Rula Khoury
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.
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Haidi Motola
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.