Khajistan Office of War Information (O.W.I.) Exhibition Guide
by Saad Khan
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Khajistan: Office of War Information (O.W.I.). Click the image to open the full exhibition guide PDF.
Khajistan: Office of War Information (O.W.I.) stages propaganda as a bureaucratic system — a simulated war-information office of archive, print room, battalion press, field station, database, and theater, compressed into one room.
A leaflet is followed through the institutions and actions that give it force: written, translated, classified, printed, dropped, filed, collected, sold, digitized, and returned as evidence. Read the Exhibition Guide or browse the Exhibition Catalog.
Exhibition Details
| When | May 8 – August 9, 2026 |
| Hours | Wed–Sun, 12:00 PM – 6:00 PM |
| Location | 159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn, NY — 3rd Floor |
| Designer | Joey Chriqui |
| Curator | Saad Khan |
| Technologist | Amad Ansari |
| Curatorial Support | Herbert A. Friedman and Ray Camp |
Pick Up a Leaflet. Enter the Code
Inside the exhibition: pick up a coded leaflet and enter its yellow code at a terminal.
Begin in the yellow O.W.I. gallery, then enter the simulated O.W.I. office, where wartime paper gives way to files, terminals, copies, clutter, and records.
Every leaflet that is framed and behind glass is an original. The loose leaflets in the office are coded reproductions. Visitors may pick one up, find the yellow code, and enter it into a terminal to view its record, including year, language, translation, imagery, place of distribution, and objective.
These handling copies come from Khajistan’s American War Propaganda Leaflets, 1990–2022 book and database. The yellow codes correspond to the book’s catalog entries.
Communication Without Conversation
A propaganda leaflet circulates before, during, and after military force. It may arrive as a warning, instruction, promise, or threat. It is used as a weapon, but often speaks in the language of help. It may be dropped by one branch of the military while another prepares the strike. Paper arrives first. Bombs may follow.
The message tells people to leave, hide, surrender, inform, obey, listen, accept food, avoid certain areas, or recognize a new authority. Its language is simple because its task is immediate: to move people, divide them, frighten them, reassure them, or make them useful to military power.
The leaflet addresses people already under threat. It speaks from above, in bulk, at speed, and without reply. It is not conversation. It is command made to look like communication. The warning and the violence belong to the same system.
This is the politics of the leaflet. A population is translated into categories: enemy, civilian, suspect, informant, ally, target. People are reduced to behaviors that can be managed. The leaflet does not simply describe war. It helps organize and administer it.
The Office of War Information was abolished in 1945, but the practice did not end. This exhibition does not claim that every later agency descends directly from O.W.I. The connection is larger and more durable: governments continue to use media to prepare, explain, soften, defend, and normalize military power.
In this exhibition, Khajistan uses O.W.I. as both title and structure. The exhibition is staged as a simulated war-information office: archive, print room, battalion press, field station, database, and theater compressed into one room. It treats propaganda as a bureaucratic system, not a loose category of images. A leaflet is followed through the institutions and actions that give it force: written, translated, classified, printed, dropped, filed, collected, sold, digitized, and returned as evidence.
Around the leaflet is a wider war-information culture: pamphlets, instruction manuals, stickers, towels used as checkpoint signage, morale patches, playing cards, reward matchbooks, survival guides, cultural-awareness booklets, sitcom episodes, and office media. The battlefield message, the soldier joke, the training card, and the domestic television loop do not perform the same function, but they belong to the same apparatus.
The names change: psychological warfare, public diplomacy, PSYOP, Military Information Support Operations, and information operations. The formats change too: leaflets, broadcasts, towels, matchbooks, television, reward objects, training cards, database entries, and souvenirs. But the procedure remains: define the audience, name the enemy, issue the warning, promise safety, demand obedience, produce consent, and convert violence into information.
These objects are not the same, and this exhibition does not flatten their differences. It places them together to show how war is communicated, administered, softened, joked about, archived, and made to appear necessary. War does not only happen through weapons. It also happens through paper, scripts, translations, instructions, broadcasts, records, and objects that teach people how to live under military power.
O.W.I. Japan Gallery
Installation views from the yellow O.W.I. Japan Gallery.
The yellow gallery presents twelve original O.W.I. leaflets airdropped over Japan in 1944–1945, framed above official wartime cut sheets marked CONFIDENTIAL and SECRET. Several are based on original works by Frances Blakemore, an American artist who lived in Japan and later designed O.W.I. airborne propaganda in Honolulu, functioning as a U.S. military native informant.
Featured O.W.I. Japan Leaflets
All from the Pacific War Propaganda Campaign, Japan, 1944–1945.
| Leaflet 1006 | Food and surrender leaflet showing Japanese delicacies, including sushi. Hunger is used as pressure against Japanese troops stranded on bypassed islands. |
| Leaflet 110 | A mother and child appear beside a skull and the warning of “certain death.” The leaflet turns family survival into an argument against continued sacrifice. |
| Leaflet 104 | Sets “the path of new life” against “the path of destruction.” The choice is made visual: survival on one side, ruin on the other. |
| Leaflet 208 | The Hinomaru flag sits at the center of the sheet. A national symbol becomes the carrier for a message about duty, endurance, and Japan’s possible fate. |
| Leaflet 210 | Disease and war are linked through bombing, damaged infrastructure, hunger, contamination, and illness. Daily survival is presented as another casualty of war. |
| Leaflet 2008 | A map of Japan is shown under pressure from surrounding weapons or projectiles. Geography becomes a diagram of encirclement. |
| Leaflet 2015 | An allegorical figure carries a traditional structure while pulling another figure upward. Duty, burden, rescue, and danger are compressed into one physical scene. |
The Simulated O.W.I. Office
The simulated O.W.I. office: desks, files, terminals, and debris.
Furniture and machines structure the office: fans, printer, CRT monitor, wastebasket, desks, files, tools, loose reproductions, shredded paper, alcohol nips, and old coffee cups.
War information is not made only in command rooms. It is assembled in battalion offices, field stations, and remote rooms close to military operations. Leaflets are copied, approved, packed, and sent into circulation under pressure: dropped from aircraft, packed into leaflet bombs, fired by artillery shell, scattered by hand, or distributed on the ground. Here, propaganda is office work for war.
The office shifts the exhibition from wartime display to administrative atmosphere. Leaflets become files, terminal entries, loose paper, copies, debris, and records.
All framed wall leaflets are original from Khajistan’s American War Propaganda Leaflets collection. Some are airdropped field recoveries; others are undropped surplus copies from printing and dissemination channels, including battalion press materials. Portions of the collection are now held at the Kislak Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
The office includes leaflets from Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Inherent Resolve, and Operation Odyssey Dawn, covering Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, and post-2001 U.S. military campaigns. They warn, threaten, instruct, solicit, isolate, and promise safety.
Different Wars, Different Audiences, Similar Messages
Leaflets across campaigns, audiences, and visual styles.
The exhibition follows this method across several campaigns: O.W.I. leaflets aimed at Japan in 1944 and 1945, Gulf War material from 1990 and 1991, Afghanistan after 2001, Iraq after 2003, anti-ISIS Iraq after 2014, and Libya in 2011. The wars differ in audience, language, technology, literacy, and visual style. The messages recur: warning, instruction, threat, reassurance, reward, blame, surrender, and administrative notice. The image changes with the audience being imagined.
The O.W.I. Japan leaflets from 1944 and 1945 belong to mid-century print culture. Many are carefully composed, hand-illustrated, and visually polished. They use beauty, allegory, cartooning, maps, and warning to make American power appear legible from the air.
The Desert Shield and Desert Storm leaflets from 1990 and 1991 still often carry the trace of hand drawing. The style is more blunt and instructional: aircraft, bombs, arrows, soldiers, surrender gestures, safe-conduct routes, and warnings. The image becomes less elegant and more procedural.
In Afghanistan after 2001, the visual language shifts toward crude digital illustration: pixelated figures, simplified planes, food parcels, flags, weapons, hand gestures, and map-like compositions. Many images feel closer to MS Paint than poster art. The design reflects speed, low literacy, multilingual conditions, and the need for instant recognition across Pashto, Dari, and local visual contexts.
In Iraq, from 1990 and 1991 through the post-2003 war, many leaflets carry more text: bombing warnings, radio frequencies, surrender instructions, safe-conduct procedures, and administrative notices. Iraq’s history of state schooling, bureaucracy, political print culture, and mass literacy shaped the kind of paper the U.S. military believed could speak there.
By Libya in 2011, the image changes again. Some leaflets use clean digital graphics, comic-book bodies, and anime-like figures. The style is sharper, flatter, and more contemporary. The leaflet no longer looks like a wartime poster or a field instruction sheet. It looks like media produced inside the visual world it is trying to enter.
Across these changes, the message remains similar. The state redraws its command in the style it believes the target population will recognize.
Military Campaigns Covered
Leaflets spanning the Pacific War to post-2001 U.S. campaigns.
| Pacific War / O.W.I. Japan | 1944–1945 |
| Gulf War — Desert Shield | August 2, 1990 – January 17, 1991 |
| Gulf War — Desert Storm | January 17 – February 28, 1991 |
| Afghanistan War | October 7, 2001 – August 30, 2021 |
| Operation Enduring Freedom | October 7, 2001 – December 31, 2014 |
| ISIS-K operations | 2015 onward |
| Operation Iraqi Freedom | March 20, 2003 – December 15, 2011 |
| Operation Inherent Resolve | October 17, 2014 – ongoing |
| Libya — Operation Odyssey Dawn | March 19–31, 2011 |
Featured Leaflets and What They Do
Coded handling copies, grouped by function.
These codes identify selected leaflets from Khajistan Press’s book American War Propaganda Leaflets, 1990–2022. In this exhibition, all original leaflets are framed on the walls. Copies of selected leaflets are scattered throughout the simulated office for handling, reading, and lookup in the computer terminals. More information on each leaflet’s design and objective can be found in the book.
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Warning and Safety Codes 1, 4, 36, 93, 282, 305 |
Warn of bombing, mines, danger zones, or instruct civilians to stay home. |
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Surrender and Compliance Codes 30, 124 |
Direct surrender, checkpoint behavior, and compliance with military control. |
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Threat, Surveillance, and Deterrence Codes 14, 123, 139, 189, 194, 201, 212, 220, 265 |
Threaten death, destruction, surveillance, or retaliation to prevent resistance. |
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Legitimacy, Aid, Peace, and Reconstruction Codes 40, 115, 136, 160, 165, 168, 173, 177, 308 |
Present intervention as peaceful, humanitarian, stabilizing, or nation-building. |
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Enemy Delegitimization Codes 6, 71, 145, 155, 181, 286, 292 |
Show Saddam, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or ISIS as corrupt, collapsing, abusive, or doomed. |
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Information and Reward Systems Codes 32, 140 |
Direct audiences to approved broadcasts or offer rewards for information. |
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Civilian Conduct and Social Control Codes 257, 258 |
Regulate everyday behavior near military forces, including warnings against throwing stones. |
Propaganda for Everyone
War-information culture beyond the leaflet: stickers, patches, cards, booklets, and souvenirs.
On Walls
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The Alphabet of Jehaad Literacy Vol. 2 Afghanistan, 1986 |
Turns literacy education into anti-Soviet political instruction. |
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Farjam-e Iblis Afghanistan and Pakistan, 1981–1985 |
Casts Soviet communism and the Kabul regime as spiritually corrupt and doomed. |
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Babrak Afghanistan and Pakistan, 1981–1985 |
Targets Babrak Karmal and links later war leaflets to earlier Cold War media structures. |
In Vitrine
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The Peace for Which We Fight U.S., 1943 |
O.W.I. postwar-order pamphlet. |
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Battle Stations for All Washington, D.C., 1943 |
Home-front economics as wartime duty. |
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Arab Cultural Awareness: 58 Factsheets Fort Leavenworth, 2006 |
Arab culture reduced to military field instruction. |
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The Life of Franklin D. Roosevelt U.S., 1942 |
Arabic O.W.I. comic as presidential propaganda. |
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Task Force Freedom Coalition Sticker K14F Kuwait, 1991 |
Coalition identity made adhesive. |
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Bomb Saddam bumper sticker Alabama, c. 1990–1991 |
Civilian pro-war slogan for domestic display. |
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Iraqi Hunting License U.S., c. 1991 |
Iraqis turned into joke targets. |
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Topps Desert Storm Cards and Stickers U.S., 1991 |
War sold as collectible entertainment. |
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Iraqi Most Wanted Playing Cards U.S., 2003 |
Wanted officials turned into game pieces. |
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“Ayatold’Ya We’d Shoot Back” patch U.S., contemporary |
Bombing turned into morale humor. |
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Army Laughs Annual U.S., 1943 |
War processed through soldier jokes. |
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Saddam, This Scud’s for You U.S., c. 1991 |
Missile violence as comic slogan. |
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Rewards for Justice matchbooks U.S., c. 1995–2005 |
Counterterror surveillance made pocket-sized. |
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Falling Leaf Magazine U.K., c. 1970s |
Psychological warfare as collector culture. |
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Worldwide Psychological Operations Conference Program Raleigh, 2003 |
PSYOP as professional network. |
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Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm PSYOP Booklet 1990–1991 |
Propaganda as military print labor. |
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Kwikpoint Visual Language Translators U.S., c. 2000s–2010s |
Occupied space turned into point-and-command communication. |
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Afghanistan Visual Language Survival Guide U.S., c. 2000s–2010s |
Local life turned into visual military instruction. |
Satellite Television Transmission
A loop of domestic sitcom episodes as office media.
| 1996 — The Simpsons, “Much Apu About Nothing” | Immigration panic and deportation satire. |
| 1998 — Friends, “The One with the Embryos” | Domestic comedy, trivia, reproduction, and friendship. |
| 1998 — Everybody Loves Raymond, “The Ride-Along” | Police work reframed through family sitcom. |
| 1999 — Friends, “The One Where Everybody Finds Out” | Private life turned into comic exposure. |
| 2001 — The Simpsons, “New Kids on the Blecch” | Boy-band parody as secret Navy recruitment satire. |
| 2003 — Everybody Loves Raymond, “Baggage” | Domestic standoff over ordinary household labor. |
The Sealed Almirah
The wired-shut almirah.
A wired-shut almirah plays audio from the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike, later released as Collateral Murder. From above, the crew watches, requests permission, and fires. A camera is mistaken for a weapon. Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh are killed. Two children are injured. Procedure becomes the sound of death.
Catalog and Collection
Scan the QR code to browse the Khajistan Pioneer Works Exhibition Catalog. Original materials listed in the catalog are available for institutional placement, purchase, or inquiry unless otherwise noted. Proceeds directly run Khajistan’s digitization, preservation, and archiving efforts throughout The Middle World.
The twelve O.W.I. Japan leaflets featured in the first gallery are selected from Khajistan’s larger collection of more than 200 original World War II leaflets produced in the United States for aerial distribution over Japan. Institutional placement with libraries, archives, and paper preservation programs is preferred.
The framed leaflets inside the simulated O.W.I. office are originals from Khajistan’s American War Propaganda Leaflets collection. Loose copies are provided for handling, reading, and terminal lookup.
Khajistan Pioneer Works Exhibition Catalog — scan to browse.
Browse the Exhibition Catalog, or contact info@khajistan.com for institutional placement, purchase, or inquiry.
