About & Mission

 

Khajistan is a New York–based archive and publishing platform founded in 2021 by filmmaker and archivist Saad Khan, dedicated to preserving and digitizing censored, banned, and underrepresented print materials and audiovisual cultural ephemera from the Middle World*. Its holdings include magazines, posters, propaganda leaflets, films, audio recordings, and born-digital media from the region, primarily from the early twentieth century onward. These are archival objects often dismissed, suppressed, or left to deteriorate. Khajistan works to rescue such histories from erasure, restoring cultural memory to the communities and contexts from which they emerged.

 

*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 shared languages, literatures, scholarly networks, trade routes, and intellectual life for over a millennium. They saw their world as the center of history.

Holdings & Archive Scale

 

• Digital archive (100 k+ memes): By 2026, Khajistan’s digital portal hosts more than 100,000 memes (photos, videos, and other digital artifacts) documenting everyday life across the Middle World. These materials are both community‑contributed and scraped from the internet for the archive.

• Toshakhana (physical archive): The physical archive holds the world’s largest collection of Pakistani film memorabilia, rare Islamicate Judaica, censored and discontinued Urdu, Persian and Arabic periodicals, and American war propaganda ephemera.

• Film ephemera: Khajistan holds over 7,000 Pakistani “Lollywood” film posters, more than 1,000 Lollywood film booklets and nearly 3,000 lobby or show cards, 90 Iranian film posters, and 200 Turkish erotic movie posters.

• Cultural magazines: The archive houses over 3000 show‑business, lifestyle, and cultural magazine issues in Urdu, Persian, Arabic, and English, spanning the 1940s‑1990s.

• U.S. Propaganda leaflets: Khajistan’s collection of propaganda materials includes hundreds of leaflets printed in Pashto, Dari, Arabic, and Japanese, dropped over Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Japan across different wars. These items show how messages and graphic strategies evolved and were used to justify military action.

• Rare books: The rare‑book library contains over 1,500 books in Urdu, Farsi, Arabic, Sindhi, Pashto, and other languages, encompassing genres from mystery digests and pulp fiction to political tracts, occult, propaganda, and religious literature from the region.

Furthermore, Khajistan has digitized over 10,000 items from Pakistan and more than 18,000 from Iran, forming one of the largest collections of previously undigitized cultural ephemera from the region.

 

Publishing

 

• Publishing arm: Khajistan Press

– Smut of the Middle World Vol. 1: Pakistan (2025) — a large‑format anthology of damaged reels, test shots and censored magazine photo‑shoots from Pakistan.
– American War Propaganda Leaflets 1990–2022 (2024) — a catalog of leaflets distributed by American military forces and the CIA in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
– Lollywood Lobby Cards Vol. 1 (2025) — a survey of Pakistani film advertising that compiles hundreds of lobby cards and publicity stills.
– Karachi, After Midnight series (2025–) — volumes drawn from a gay man’s early‑2000s online diary; Volume I, Part II: Storm Season juxtaposes personal turmoil with Karachi’s chaos during a turbulent month.
– Dickiran (2023) — a risograph book of tender drawings based on Iranian dick pics from cyberspace.
– Kharabat: Photo Archives of Iran’s Lūtis — a forthcoming photographic archive exploring Iran’s male subcultures.
– Mashallah Bohot Zabardast Vol. 1 — Images and text from social media apps in Pakistan.

 

Exhibitions & Programming

 

• Spasial Program – SculptureCenter (Jun 19 – Jul 28 2025): Khajistan presented a selection of banned, censored, and overlooked audio‑visual and print media alongside a weekend bazaar. The show highlighted the archive’s digital platform and physical holdings. “Spasial program” refers to a hashtag that led to the archive’s Instagram accounts being banned multiple times and, in Khawaja Sira slang, means “special event."

• Press Play 2025 – Pioneer Works (Dec 13 – Dec 14, 2025): As the featured exhibitor at Pioneer Works’ book fair, Khajistan presented Karachi, After Midnight Vol. 1, launched Smut of the Middle World Vol. 1: Pakistan, and produced a limited-edition Press Play bag inspired by 1970s call-girl ads.

• Office of War Information (O.W.I.) – Pioneer Works (May 8 – Aug 9, 2026): Khajistan’s next exhibition transforms Pioneer Works’ gallery into a deliberately chaotic wartime bureaucracy inspired by the U.S. Office of War Information, featuring hundreds of propaganda leaflets—airdropped across Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Japan from World War II through the War on Terror. The exhibition draws on Khajistan’s collection of U.S. military and CIA pamphlets (now held by the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center) and on Japanese‑language leaflets from World War II, tracing the developmental arc and enduring nature of psychological warfare tactics.

• Additional programs: Khajistan organizes bazaars, film screenings, listening parties and lectures. The archive has also hosted reading rooms and digital workshops.

 

Buyers and Partners

 

Khajistan’s collections have been acquired by numerous institutions, including Penn Libraries (University of Pennsylvania), Princeton University Library, New York University (NYU), Stanford Libraries, Lafayette College, University of Washington – Bothell, University of Texas, University of California, Los Angeles,  University of California, Berkley, Queens Public Library, Los Angeles Public Library, Bodleian Libraries (University of Oxford), New York Public Library, and Library of Congress.

Team & Contacts

• Team: Khajistan is led by Saad Khan and Joey Chriqui, working with a network of vendors and collectors across the region, as well as archive managers based in Islamabad, Quetta, Istanbul, and New York City.

• Mailing Address: 42 West Street, Brooklyn, NY 11222

• Email: info@khajistan.com

• Instagram: @khajistanpress & @khajistan.archive
• Website:  khajistan.com