Recently, I managed to visit Spasial Program by Khajistan installation at the SculptureCenter in LIC. Khajistan is directed (and founded) by Saad Khan and the exhibition was directed by Joey Chriqui.
The opening walls feature some of what Khajistan’s manifesto affirms as its collection practices: “Leaflets that fell from the sky. Mujra posters. Madrassa books. Digests sold in silence. Photos. Tapes. Background scores. State propaganda. Zines no one kept. Footage no one wanted. Pictures pulled from your uncle’s porn stash.”
The SculptureCenter’s lower level gallery consist of two long corridors, all bare concrete and brick with recesses in which tv monitors and frames are placed. The show attempts to provide a snapshot of the vast physical and digital archive of “banned, censored, and overlooked audiovisual and print media.” As one walks through the gallery, there is a plethora of ephemera of street politics, of popular entertainment, of erotica, of suppressed sexualities. State censors or public morality police shape some of the works, others are marked with their encounter with imperial and colonial forces. The scripts, colors, languages of the “-stans” cohabit implicitly with Iran and North Africa. A mishmash of socialities and religiosities marked in some ways with their encounter with “the West.”
A viewer shaped by “respectable” class upbringing or by US media would feel estranged by the materials assembled. The rudimentary labeling and catalog will not prepare them for either the explicit sexuality (both same-sex and hetero) or the celebration of censorial aesthetic (the black bar over exposed cleavage or cross-check drawn over open thighs were often meant to eroticize a formally unremarkable image rather than diminish its erotic potential). Nor will the strands of history, of politics or even of political history be familiar.
Undoubtedly, the Khajistan collection as a whole, and this “Spasial Program” exhibit demonstrates the incredible strength of “counterculture” from “Indus to the Maghreb.” The zines and print-collection show how interlinked were the visual languages of erotica and politics. The tapes and archived websites showcase the production of “freedoms”–be that the freedom of assembling histories of Palestine in the late 90s and early 00s or the freedom to splice X-rated material within action movie scenes. Night and day intersect with private and public spaces. The viewer may not understand that much of the X-rated material was consumed by working class men in cinema houses in company of hundreds of other men and not in dark, private rooms. These shows took place in late afternoons not at night. The magazines with erotic stories, pictures or politically risible (to the State) content were sold in small neighborhood lending libraries and deli shops, not in bookstores or libraries. The production or consumption of this cheap, ephemeral material was shaped by male dominance over the public space and homosocial private spaces. The male gaze dominates the show for a reason.
I have spent nearly fifteen years thinking and researching about South Asia from marginal perspectives. I have encountered most of the materials in Khajistan archive in homes, schools and bazaars across Pakistan. I am deeply appreciative of the project of archiving and collecting that Khajistan represents–not merely a valorization of anti-normative sexualities but their profound political and intellectual contributions to a more humane, plural and just society. I also want to affirm the economic model of “self-funding” which rests mainly on selling digitized and published materials to “UPenn, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, the Library of Congress, and their likes,” in order to fund more acquisitions.
Still, the political economy of production, of consumption, of archivization, and of remembering are not the same. I do not mean here the ‘transfer’ of materials from the postcolony to the metropole. I am more interested in the shaping of the public that understands “counterculture” to its dominant or hegemonic culture. A young girl, in Pakistan, who made short videos for her tiktok from shopping malls is gunned down by a stalker, only for the news media to label her videos (ephemeral) as the cause of the violence against her.
To write a history of Pakistan, or Afghanistan, or Iran from the perspective of these assembled archives, thus, remains an impossible task because the banned, the censored, the suppressed, and the trashed are still politically understood as cultural detritus. Recent instances of violences against women in Pakistan reflect precisely the dehumanization of female body, sexuality and will. There is an alarming rise of “incels” or of performative alpha-male sexuality as overt social positions. It is within this discourse that the “everyday” and not the “obscene” which is considered a transgression against patriarchal hetero-normativity and an incitement to violence.
The “Spasial Program” exhibit deserves wide and critical reflection. It marks a new entry into cultural histories of the postcolony. I encourage people to visit their site.