No Myth Here — Khajistan in Pioneer Works' Broadcast

Pioneer Works published “No Myth Here,” a conversation between Khajistan’s Saad Khan and Joey Chriqui and the poet Megan Fernandes, in its Broadcast series on 23 July 2026. Khajistan: Office of War Information (O.W.I.) was on view at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn until 9 August.

The conversation starts with how the archive began. Khan describes collecting newspaper clippings as a child, and later recording livestreams and memes off Bigo Live and TikTok in 2016 and 2017, years before either app reached the United States, then getting banned from Instagram for posting them. He gives 2021 as the year Khajistan was formally established, around Showgirls of Pakistan. Chriqui, the creative director, is from a Jewish family from the Maghreb; the distance between Morocco and Pakistan is described in the interview as part of what built the world of the archive.

Chriqui designed the O.W.I. room floor to ceiling. Steel tanker desks, a drop-tile ceiling, windows he made sure were left unwashed, a fan, a rusting metal cabinet. A different brand of cigarette is stubbed out at each desk — Marlboro Lights at one, a Scotch cigarette at the other, the empty packets shoved into the drawers. Hundreds of American leaflets dropped over Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya between 1990 and 2022 are spread across the floor. Some of the office furniture came from his father’s office. A rerun of Friends plays in the corner.

“Oh my god, it’s like my uncle’s office.” But your uncle could have been the one printing these leaflets, because these people were uncles. They are your regular people. There’s no myth here.

— Saad Khan

Khan reads the leaflet as paperwork: the thing a general can point to when he is summoned before Congress and has to say the warning was given before the bombs. He sets the two imperial methods next to each other — the British came to South Asia with the railways and the lathi charge, and American power arrives with leaflets, then bombs, then nonprofits. The television is in the same category. Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond, The Simpsons.

Fernandes asks about legibility, and who these materials are legible to. Khan answers with the small things: squatting to shit, washing with water, men keeping pigeons, loving in silence or through poetry, and the handshake between men in which a finger is rubbed inside the other’s palm to ask, without a word, whether they want to fuck. That gesture is on the cover of one of the books. It appears nowhere in the official record.

The interview is direct about translation. Khajistan does not impose “LGBT” or “queer” on lived experience unless the subject used the word himself, as Shams does in Karachi After Midnight, where the author calls himself gay. Chriqui describes that as a point of contention while editing, settled in favour of the subject’s own words. Homosexual Desires in Madrassas came out with no framing at all, and some bookshops read it as homophobic material and declined it. Framing gets added now.

The last part is about survival, the materials’ and their own. Khan says they work fast because they were raised to think tomorrow is short, and that people tell him to do one book a year. Chriqui ends on his father’s basement, the canned food and the hundreds of glass bottles filled with water: that was his father’s modality for survival, and this is theirs.

Khan’s proposed title for the piece was We Do It for Our Dads.

Read the full conversation at Pioneer Works Broadcast →

Interview by Megan Fernandes for Pioneer Works Broadcast, 23 July 2026. Installation photographs by Dan Bradica, courtesy of the artists and Pioneer Works.