Pray Land

What it is

Pray Land is an immersive art exhibition you walk inside. Part sanctuary, part gallery, it is a single room built around a hanging olive tree, surrounded by paintings, fabric, light, scent, and sound, an environment designed to be experienced with the whole body, not just the eyes.

It is the work of Palestinian artist Hanny Al Khoury, the third major series from his studio. Where his earlier work hung on walls, this one asks you to come inside it.

What you see when you enter

The room is dim. Hymns reconstructed from some of the oldest written musical notation play quietly. Air carries the scent of resins used in ancient ceremonies. Paintings rise along the walls. Embroidered fabric divides the space.

At the centre, an olive tree hangs from above, inverted, its roots reaching toward the sky and its branches reaching down toward you. The ceiling above the tree is painted as the sky at first light.

Through a curtain, a second, smaller chamber opens, a quieter inner room where the work invites you to pause.

What it's about

Pray Land is not a memorial and not a sermon. It is a place. Its subject is the land underneath every border that has been drawn on top of it, and the ancestry (Canaanite, Aramaic, Arabic) that runs through Palestinian identity older than any modern conflict.

The piece does not argue. It does not ask anyone to take a side. It opens a door and invites people to step through.

How it travels

The temple is designed to be assembled, disassembled, and carried. It can be raised in any city that hosts it, and is intended one day to be sold whole, to live permanently in a single place that will hold it.

Until then, it moves.

About the artist

Hanny Al Khoury (HK Studio) is a Palestinian painter whose work has moved from classical realism through a breakout series of original abstraction, into Fragments (a series of cut canvases responding to the October 2023 war) and now into Pray Land, the largest piece he has made.