Khajistan Portal Opens at Recess, Brooklyn

Khajistan Institute for Advanced Research and Necessary Development
Recess, 46 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205
September 19 to October 24, 2026

Khajistan is moving part of the archive into a room in Brooklyn for two months and building the rest of it in front of whoever walks in.

The Institute for Advanced Research and Necessary Development opens at Recess on September 19. Inside are three collections. A Reading Room of digitized books, magazines, comics, and periodicals. A Screening Room of film and moving-image material acquired for the archive, covering documentary, narrative and commercial cinema, and smut. A Born-Digital Archive of memes, images, videos, and social media material collected across the Middle World. The three are joined by the Khajistan Portal, a search interface built around a map of the regions the archive comes from, the Indus to the Maghreb. A visitor can enter through a place and leave through a language, a format, a subject, or a decade.

The Portal is unfinished, which is the reason to build it in a public room instead of on a server. This material breaks standard cataloging. Titles arrive in Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Pashto, Punjabi, Hebrew, and French, transliterated four different ways depending on who typed them. Dates are printed in more than one calendar. Photographs carry no captions and the people in them were never named in print. Software can guess at all of this. Someone who recognizes the shop sign, the dialect, or the face can do better.

The room is set up for that. Seven workstations, printers, and open hours across the run. Visitors can search the collections, trace a source, offer a translation, correct a date, name what is missing, and say plainly where the interface stops making sense. Anything printed during a session stays in the room and accumulates, leaving a physical record of what people looked for and came back to.

The Portal is one door into the site the Institute is building, and the other rooms are open on the workstations too. The Screening Room carries the films of the Khajistan Film Vault, thirty-two titles at opening, watchable in the room and rentable outside it. The Receiver tunes live television and radio from across the regions the way a set-top dial does, one frequency at a time, and carries the Khajistan Radio mixes. The Madrassa is the reference wing: an encyclopedia of the archive, essays and forensic readings of single documents, and a street dictionary of slang, idiom and cinema-speak in Urdu, Farsi, Pashto and Arabic, each entry tied to the material it was heard or printed in. A Human Desk takes what a visitor recognizes on a scan or in a recording and files it against the object.

Programming

Opening Reception. Saturday, September 19, 1 to 4 PM. Chai, sweets, and biscuits. Saad Khan will lead a salon-style conversation about the material in the archive and introduce the Portal, which will be live and open to use for the length of the reception.

Portal Test Day and Workshop. Saturday, October 3, 1 to 4 PM. A hands-on session co-facilitated with the artist Umber Majeed, working through metadata, regional tags, and translations.

Office Hours and Screening. Saturdays, October 10 and 17. From 1 to 4 PM the Portal is open with the Khajistan team. At 4 PM, a screening of Javaid Shampoo (2004, directed by Faisal Rehman and Bilal Hasan Minto) in its Directors’ Cut, from the Khajistan Film Vault. Popcorn provided.

The session closes October 24.

Recess is free and open to the public. If you read any of these languages, or grew up with these magazines, the archive can use you in the room.