Opening Reception
Wed Jun 18, 2025, 6-8pm
This summer, SculptureCenter presents Spasial Program by Khajistan* in our lower level galleries.
Khajistan Bazaar – Sundays, 12-6pm
Born in 9th-century Herat, Afghanistan, today Khajistan lives on as an archive founded by Saad Khan. Khajistan saves, digitizes, and distributes art, words, and media from forgotten or silenced communities, stretching from the Indus to the Maghreb. Their work addresses gaps or losses of diverse local cultural expression within mainstream “global” media settings while considering how changing Western technologies (and a lopsided internet) risk intensifying the cultural disappearance of marginalized communities.
In 2025, Khajistan’s growing digital archive has over 85,000 community-contributed photos and videos, while Toshakhana, Khajistan's physical archive, contains the world's largest collection of Pakistani film memorabilia, rare gems like Islamicate Judaica, censored and discontinued Urdu, Farsi, and Arabic magazines, and American and local war propaganda.
At SculptureCenter, Khajistan presents a #spasialprogram, opening its vault of banned, censored, and overlooked audiovisual and print media, alongside a weekend bazaar.
Visit the Khajistan website and archives, read the full Khajistan Manifesto, and browse other materials here.
*Spasial Program (a misspelling of both special and spatial) refers to a hashtag attached to content that has compelled Instagram to ban Khajistan’s social media accounts six times. In Khawaja Sira (Pakistan’s third-gender community) slang, it also means “special event.”
Khajistan Team
Founder and Director: Saad Khan
Art Director and Exhibition Designer: Joey Chriqui
Production Designer: Kevin Castaneda
Technologist: Amad Ansari
Curators: Farhad Qashqai (Tehran); Omar Ali Khan (Islamabad); Joey Chriqui (New York City); Saad Khan (New York City); Amad Ansari (New York City); Guddu (Karachi)
Archive Managers: A*vin (Istanbul); Akasha A. (Islamabad); Naz (Islamabad); Farid (Kabul); Hassan (Cairo); Pejman G. (Tehran); Shah (Karachi); Zulqarnain Z. (Quetta); Christie (New York City)
This project is part of Open Process, a new series where SculptureCenter hands over the lower level gallery to artists and collectives to work on an ongoing project or to develop a new one during the time of their exhibition. The program is an invitation to experiment with the exhibition form as an unfixed, durational, and dialogical process. Open Process welcomes unscripted encounters, learning opportunities, and collective exercises that open the institution to different facets of the artist's practice and provide a chance for an extended engagement with their process and methodologies.
