The Lost Paintings - Closing panel with artists Yara Kassem Mahajena and Steve Sabella

The invitation to artists for participating in the Lost Paintings project, was based on 53 titles of paintings of the artist Maroun Tomb, which were presented in an exhibition in Haifa in 1947 and lost amidst the Palestinian Nakba of 1948. The lack of any visual trace of this exhibition, creates a void and prompts the imagining of not only what was, but also what has become, and what might be. Titles such as Haifa Port, Acre Wall, A View in Jaffa, seduces us into thinking how the artist depicted these places and landscapes in Palestine of the 1940s, but also to envision all that has happened in these places and to these places since – the erasure, the destruction and the ethnic cleansing – and which continue to this day across Palestine. But it also provokes us towards a future, and using artistic methods to envision alternative realities inspired by the surviving titles.

Visual culture and images play an important role in building our perception of the world and the political changes we strive for. The philosopher Chiara Boticci addresses the paradox of a world saturated with images but deprived of imagination, and explores the connection between the abundance of creation and distribution of images in the globalised digital age, which she links to a crisis of political imagination – our diminishing capacity to envision new and radically different images of the world.

The closing panel of The Lost Paintings exhibition offers the exploration of these questions from the perspective of lens-based art. Panellists and contributing artists Yara Kassem Mahajena, Steve Sabella, will discuss their practice and work with images and moving-images and the role of imagination in them.

The artists will each deliver presentations on their work in the film screen space within our Upper Gallery, followed by a Q&A.

Participating artists: Steve Sabella / Yara Kassem Mahajena

Steve Sabella is an established artist and author possessing a distinct style that has earned him numerous awards and accolades. Born in Jerusalem, Palestine, and based in Berlin since 2010, Sabella’s bold work is recognizable for its themes of identity and displacement, exile, the effects of colonization, liberation, and the human condition in a powerful way while celebrating the resilience of the human spirit. Sabella is also the author of the award-winning memoir The Parachute Paradox (2016), which tackles the colonization of the imagination and The Artist’s Curse: On Being an Artist: Navigating the Art Market and the Art World (2023).

Yara Kassem Mahajena is a Palestinian multidisciplinary artist, lecturer and co-founder of Shahinat Burtuqal, a digital platform promoting Palestinian art. Her work explores trauma with a focus on political trauma and animal resistance in Palestine. She holds BA and MFA degrees from Haifa University, a Community Art certificate from Beit Berl, and a Leadership certificate from Roger Williams University (USA). Yara has taught at Haifa and Mercy University (NY) and held roles at Givat Haviva, Bezalel Academy and Umm Al-Fahm Museum. She has exhibited and curated internationally and received multiple awards recognising her artistic achievements.