Khajistan: Office Of War Information (O.W.I.) Exhibition at Pioneer Works
by Khajistan Cultural Desk
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Thousands of U.S. propaganda leaflets accumulate in a simulated wartime office.
ON VIEW
May 8 to August 9, 2026
New York, NY, March 24, 2026—Pioneer Works is pleased to present Office of War Information (O.W.I.), an exhibition by the archive and publishing platform Khajistan. Founded in 2021 by filmmaker and archivist Saad Khan, Khajistan preserves and digitizes censored and underrepresented print media from a geographic culture that stretches from North Africa to South Asia. The exhibition will open on May 9, 2026, with a public opening reception on Friday, May 8, 2026, from 7–9 pm.
In 2022, Khajistan began to collect hundreds of pamphlets that the American military and CIA air-dropped on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya during U.S.-led military operations from the late twentieth century to the present. Those materials have since been acquired by the Kislak Center at the University of Pennsylvania and published into a volume titled America War Propaganda Leaflets (1990 - 2022). Drawing from that archive, as well as Khajistan’s collection of American war leaflets distributed throughout Japan during World War II, this exhibition lays bare the directives and justifications that have long underpinned America’s wars abroad.
The installation of O.W.I. emulates the Office of War Information, a bygone government agency once tasked with disseminating news about U.S. military activity to both the American public and its wartime adversaries. Khajistan transforms the third floor gallery space into a chaotic bureaucratic environment, littered with copied leaflets that emerge, automatically and persistently, from a central printer. At several computer stations, visitors can browse a digital archive pairing scanned leaflets with their English translations and historical context. By extending further back into history, the exhibition traces the developmental arc and enduring nature of the psychological tactics enacted by the United States against foreign nations.
Khajistan notes, “O.W.I. brings together American military propaganda leaflets dropped over different countries across decades and places them within a decaying office setting, where they are continuously printed and accumulate in piles. As they stack up, shifts in graphic style and language become visible, but so do the continuities. Across wars, complex political realities are reduced to a single enemy, and military action is framed as reluctant, necessary, and even humane.
“These leaflets are not only addressed to the people below them; they also create a record for audiences at home, establishing that warnings were issued, evacuation routes were offered, and force was presented as a last resort. The result is not spectacle, but exposure—a direct experience of how consent is built, repeated, and believed. Together, these materials show how war justifies itself in advance.”
Khajistan: O.W.I. is designed by Joey Chriqui, curated by Saad Khan with curatorial and technology support by Ray Camp and Amad Ansari. The exhibition is supported, in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
¹ Middle World refers to the transregional civilizational sphere stretching from the Indus through Central Asia and Persia to the Middle East and North Africa, where interconnected Islamicate societies for over a millennium shared languages, literatures, scholarly networks, trade routes, and intellectual life. They saw their world as the center of history.
