The project, The Lost Paintings: A Prelude to Return, is an imagined recreation of an exhibition by Palestinian-Lebanese artist Maroun Tomb, which took place in Haifa at the end of 1947. This was the artist’s last exhibition in Palestine before the Zionist occupation and his forced exile to Lebanon, his father's home country. The 53 oil paintings that were presented at the exhibition, like most of his artworks, were lost in the Nakba. The only records left of the exhibition are an invitation, an inventory of the paintings and a letter dated January 1948, in which Tomb describes the opening evening and the events in Haifa to his friend and fellow artist.

The project aims to retrieve a piece of lost history while creating something new, bridging it with the present.