About dkrayatna

dkrayatna officially launched in spring of 2025. Before that, the ideas and designs grew over years of creating art and were conceptualized inside the head of the founder Leila, a Palestinian-Finnish multidisciplinary artist based in Helsinki, Finland who grew up in a Palestinian village in Israel. Her art explores empathy, culture, identity, and memory through various mediums with the aim of finding out how to extract these emotions of memories, making people feel what she once felt, and putting a sense of stillness into an otherwise floating and always changing memory. We can create art of memories, and leave it. And sometimes they might stop following us. The accuracy of a memory is something she is interested in, and the shapes of the things she remembers. How accurate is it to her own memory and how accurate is something that she remembers how it made her feel? 

dkrayatna is a design project inspired by a Palestinian childhood, and was created to celebrate Arab culture while speaking openly about its complexities — the beauty, the traditions, and the challenges that are often left unspoken. We honor our heritage while also challenging the harmful norms that have limited freedom and opportunity, especially for women.

The name dkrayatna comes from the Arabic word ذكرياتنا, meaning “our memories”. It draws from the collective memory of the Arab world: our parents’ memories, memories of childhood friends we grew apart from, memories from our neighborhoods, memories we shy away from remembering, memories we never believed we deserved. Our memories, dkrayatna.

Though dkrayatna’s art is inspired by memories from the Arab world, it is open to everyone. We believe that anyone can connect with the themes that are part of dkrayatna as a lot of those experiences are shared globally. We all have memories, the warm ones and the difficult ones. 

We welcome all who wish to spend time with us, support us, and spark empathy within and across cultures. We believe that when we share our memories, we feel seen. In a world that often divides, empathy brings us back to one another.

Through graphic design, tatreez (traditional Palestinian embroidery), fashion, and printed works such as posters, postcards, and apparel, we tell these stories in bold, meaningful ways while staying authentic and grounded in our own personal experiences.