Khajistan’s Office of War Information in The Guardian
by Khajistan Cultural Desk
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The Guardian recently published a piece on Khajistan’s exhibition Office of War Information (O.W.I.), now on view at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. The article asks a direct question: the United States has dropped millions of propaganda leaflets across war zones, but do they actually work?
The exhibition takes that question into the material itself: the paper, the language, the image, the threat, the translation, and the bureaucracy behind it.
Office of War Information takes its title from the U.S. government agency that coordinated wartime propaganda during the Second World War. The exhibition follows that logic into later American wars, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, where leaflets were used to warn, threaten, persuade, and justify.
At Pioneer Works, the leaflets are shown inside a decaying office environment. A printer continues to produce copies. Paper accumulates. The room feels administrative rather than dramatic. The setting points to the systems behind the object: the translator, designer, officer, printer, file, and approval process that turn military force into official communication.
A leaflet is a small printed object carrying a large assumption. It assumes that warning can soften violence. It assumes that translation can create trust. It assumes that people under military pressure can be addressed as an audience.
The question of effectiveness has no clean answer. Some leaflets may have changed behavior. Many likely did not. But their function was never only persuasion. They also created a record. They allowed the military to say: civilians were warned, instructions were given, communication was attempted.
In that sense, the leaflet is paperwork.
These materials were often made for people already reduced by military language into targets, enemies, locals, or populations. Their languages were used instrumentally. Their fears were studied. Their religions, family structures, and social codes were turned into messaging tools.
The exhibition does not present the leaflets as neutral design objects or military collectibles. It presents them as printed evidence of distance, bureaucracy, racial thinking, and control.
Khajistan’s wider archive usually preserves print made from within the region: magazines, posters, political weeklies, satire, pulp, erotica, religious publications, and other materials often ignored by institutions. The leaflets in Office of War Information come from a different direction. They were not made by a public for itself. They were made by a military to act upon a public.
A magazine speaks from inside a social world. A propaganda leaflet speaks from above it.
Leaflets were designed for temporary use. They were dropped, scattered, read, ignored, feared, collected, or discarded. Preserving them changes their status. They stop being only instruments of an operation and become records of how power imagined its audience.
The Guardian asks whether these leaflets worked. The exhibition shows what they reveal: the attempt to make violence procedural, legible, and defensible through paper.
