A Message From Hanny

In a place like Palestine, your relationship with the land begins long before you understand what homeland means.

It begins at home.

In the smell of food. In the sound of family. In a tree you've known since childhood. In a prayer you heard from your grandmother. In small things you never realized, at the time, you would carry with you for the rest of your life.

Over the last twenty years of making art, every time I was in need of inspiration, I always kept returning to the same place.

Home.

Six months ago I asked myself a question I had never dared to ask before.

What would I make if nothing had ever happened to this land?

We have learned to paint the wound. But before it, there was the sea, the sun, and the olive tree. A mother. A table. Bread in the oven, coffee being poured, a window opening in the morning.

And there was prayer.

Ordinary things. Perhaps the most sacred things of all.

I realized I was not searching for the Palestine that was. I was searching for the Palestine that still lives in all of us. In what we inherited. In the way we love. In the stories we hand to our children without knowing we are doing it.

From this, PRAY LAND was born. A collection that is meant for our homes, so a little bit of Palestine can hang beside the table where the coffee is poured, in every city we have scattered to.

My goal is not to bring back the past. But to give people the gift of feeling Palestinian in the simple moments of the day.

I hope you, or whoever you gift this to, finds a little of themselves in it every day. Piece by piece, until we are whole again.

— Hanny Al Khoury