Long Island City, New York
Group Exhibition
Spasial Program
Sculpture CenterThis summer, SculptureCenter presents Spasial Program by Khajistan in our lower level galleries. Born in 9th-century Herat, Afghanistan, today Khajistan lives on as an archive founded by Saad Khan. Khajistan saves, digitizes, and distributes art, words, and media from forgotten or silenced communities, stretching from the Indus to the Maghreb. Their work addresses gaps or losses of diverse local cultural expression within mainstream "global" media settings while considering how changing Western technologies (and a lopsided internet) risk intensifying the cultural disappearance of marginalized communities. In 2025, Khajistan's growing digital archive has over 85,000 community-contributed photos and videos, while Toshakhana, Khajistan's physical archive, contains the world's largest collection of Pakistani film memorabilia, rare gems like Islamicate Judaica, censored and discontinued Urdu, Farsi, and Arabic magazines, and American and local war propaganda. At SculptureCenter, Khajistan presents a #spasialprogram, opening its vault of banned, censored, and overlooked audiovisual and print media, alongside a weekend bazaar. *Spasial Program (a misspelling of both special and spatial) refers to a hashtag attached to content that has compelled Instagram to ban Khajistan's social media accounts six times. In Khawaja Sira (Pakistan's third-gender community) slang, it also means "special event." This project is part of Open Process, a new series where SculptureCenter hands over the lower level gallery to artists and collectives to work on an ongoing project or to develop a new one during the time of their exhibition. The program is an invitation to experiment with the exhibition form as an unfixed, durational, and dialogical process. Open Process welcomes unscripted encounters, learning opportunities, and collective exercises that open the institution to different facets of the artist's practice and provide a chance for an extended engagement with their process and methodologies.