Food, Land and Rituals is the second product of our Together Project, bringing Sudan, Jammu and Kashmir, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the Rohingya community, and Palestine together through the things we grow, cook, serve, and gather around.
Created with British-Bangladeshi illustrator Maryam Huq, the artwork is divided into four sections, each rooted in a different place and explored through food, agriculture, and everyday ritual. At first they appear as separate tables, but look a little closer and familiar threads begin to emerge: rice grown from the land, tea poured for a pause or conversation, vegetables cultivated and shared, bread passed between people, and recipes that continue through families even when people themselves are displaced.
Sudan begins with ful, one of the country’s most familiar everyday dishes, surrounded by bread, egg, chilli, and the things that turn a simple meal into something shared. The bread used to scoop and eat ful creates another connection across the artwork, leading us to the kandur, the traditional neighbourhood baker in Jammu and Kashmir, and to the taboon in Palestine. In both places, bread is tied not only to food but to routine, community, and the familiar ritual of collecting something freshly baked for the household.
Rice creates another thread. It is an important crop across Jammu and Kashmir, where it remains deeply connected to agriculture and the table, and it is equally central to Bangladesh, the host country of more than 1.2 million displaced Rohingya people.
Kashmir is represented across both Jammu and Kashmir and Azad Jammu and Kashmir because we did not want to reduce a divided region to one version of Kashmiri life. Tea carries another connection: salted nun chai and the sweet pink chai familiar in Azad Jammu and Kashmir may be prepared differently, but both speak to hospitality, gathering, and the ritual of stopping to share something warm. In that sense, the cup connects back to Sudanese shai and forward to tea shared around Palestinian tables too.
The Rohingya section centres rice, aubergine, pumpkin, and the banana leaf, reflecting foods and agricultural traditions connected to life before displacement. Today, more than 1.2 million Rohingya refugees are hosted in Bangladesh, the vast majority in Cox’s Bazar. Displacement means access to land, ingredients, and familiar foodways has changed, but there is also a connection with the host country: Bangladesh is itself a deeply agricultural landscape where rice, vegetables, and fruit form part of everyday growing and eating. That relationship with land and food became part of why working with Maryam, whose own heritage is British-Bangladeshi, felt especially meaningful for this piece.
Palestine is represented through musakhan, where olive oil, onion, sumac, and chicken are layered over taboon bread and brought together in a dish made for sharing. Around it sit olives and citrus, ingredients inseparable from Palestinian agriculture and the landscape itself. The taboon itself carries another layer of connection: traditionally used as a communal oven, it was not only a place for baking bread but also a place of gathering and exchange.
Across all four sections, the similarities are not there to suggest that these cultures are the same. They show how food can reveal connections we may never have realised were there: bread shaped by communal ritual, rice grown across different landscapes, tea becoming a reason to stop and talk, crops carrying the memory of land, and meals creating a place to gather even when home has been disrupted.
Together began with a belief that our struggles and our freedoms do not exist entirely apart from one another. This artwork starts with the table, but asks us to look beyond it: at who grows the food, who has access to land, who has been displaced from it, and how culture continues regardless.
Artwork by Maryam Huq @vividbymaryam.
