Khajistan in Hyperallergic — The Detritus of Censored Culture
by Khajistan Cultural Desk
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Hyperallergic published “Saad Khan Archives the Detritus of Censored Culture,” written by Naib Mian, on 8 April 2026. Mian visited the Queens apartment in the autumn of 2025 and reported the piece from there and from Spasial Program, Khajistan’s exhibition in the basement of SculptureCenter in Long Island City.
The piece starts with the Instagram grid — WhatsApp forwards, domestic interiors, feet, half-nude hairy athletes, men in shalwar kameez holding each other — and works back from it to the archive underneath. Khan gives the origin as Lahore in the 1990s and early 2000s, where this material was the ordinary print culture of working-class neighbourhoods: his brother reading sex stories, his father’s Urdu sexology book. He arrived in the United States in 2014 and started assembling the memes and images that made the world he came from legible to himself.
You can call it “subculture,” but let’s talk about numbers. People living there are consuming this.
— Saad Khan, to Hyperallergic
Mian counts roughly 85,000 community contributions behind the social accounts at the time of writing, and reports that the accounts have been flagged and shut down more than six times on Instagram. Toshakhana, the physical archive in Brooklyn, is described through its holdings: Cold War American and Soviet propaganda, pre-revolutionary Iranian periodicals, Ottoman erotica, Islamicate Judaica from Tunisia and Iraq.
The press gets a paragraph of its own — American War Propaganda Leaflets, Loose Cannons and Dangerous Curves, Homosexual Desires in Madrassas, Humayun Iqbal’s 1970 novel Challawa, and Karachi, After Midnight, the 2003 blog of an anonymous gay Pakistani man reproduced with the language of every post kept intact. The article also records the placements: the Kislak Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Princeton and Stanford libraries.
On Spasial Program: two yellow walls of film memorabilia, memes and censored street art; a vaulted corridor of film posters and collages built to pull passersby into bootleg porn screenings; a vitrine holding The Alphabet of Jehaad Literacy, the anti-Soviet primer designed at the Universities of Nebraska and Wisconsin for distribution in Afghanistan in the 1980s; and a makeshift theatre running Zinda Laash (1967), which went out of circulation under Zia-ul-Haq.
Mian’s argument about censorship is a class argument. Censorship marks off the culture that gets state funding and travels to festivals and biennales, and it shields the respectable consumer from what the underclasses look at. The corporate platform does the same work as the censor board. Khan gives the Urdu word for what the archive is actually holding: bunawat, the weaving of the social tapestry, with propaganda, humour, sexual exploitation and power all inside it.
One note on the record. Hyperallergic dates the founding to 2019, out of the material Khan had gathered for his films. Our own posts, and the Pioneer Works interview, give 2021 as the year Khajistan was formally established. Both dates are in print.
Read the full piece at Hyperallergic →
Text by Naib Mian for Hyperallergic, 8 April 2026. Photographs by Omar El Kays and Charles Benton.
