About this Event
Join Khajistan for the final public testing session and closing celebration of its Session at Recess.
From 1–3 PM, Khajistan founding member Saad Khan will give a closing talk reflecting on the development of the Khajistan Portal and highlighting new materials, contributions, and insights added since the opening of the residency.
Visitors will then be invited to contribute to the Portal’s continued development by translating materials, identifying people and places, tracing image sources, adding cultural or political context, flagging errors, and suggesting connections between materials.
The session will also introduce and test new features developed in response to the first Portal Test Day.
Visitors do not need to be researchers or specialists. Familiarity with languages, places, media, or cultural references represented in the archive is welcome, but not required.
From 3–5 PM, we’ll close out the residency with drinks and a light dinner.
Throughout its Session at Recess, Khajistan has transformed the gallery into The Institute for Advanced Research and Necessary Development—a public workspace for building the next phase of an archive that will soon comprise more than two million pages of content.
The archive does not end with this residency. The contributions, questions, connections, and gaps identified by visitors will become part of Khajistan’s ongoing work to determine how its collections are organized, mapped, and made accessible.
Come help shape what comes next, then stay for a final gathering with Khajistan and Recess.
About the Project
For its Session at Recess, , Khajistan is developing the Khajistan Portal, a connected digital environment for accessing and moving through its growing digital archive of more than two million pages of material. The Portal brings together digitized books, magazines, comics, periodicals, films, moving-image media, memes, images, videos, and social media materials from across the "Middle World" (a term coined by Afghan-American scholar, Tamim Ansary, to describe the gestalt of land that has existed under Islamic empires in the last 1400 years or so.)
For the last 5 years, Khajistan has been documenting and preserving the lives, knowledge, art, and creative works of censored peoples in Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, with an intention to expand our archiving efforts to censorious nation-states that now form over the expansive lands of Arabia and Bukhara.
About Session
Recess’s Session program offers artists flexible time and space to develop ambitious projects in a public setting. Visitors encounter works-in-progress, installations, and collaborative experiments as they evolve in real time.
Session supports the creation of new work by giving artists a project stipend, artist’s fee, technical support, mentorship, and approximately two months to transform Recess into a hybrid of a productive studio space dynamic exhibition platform. Throughout the session, we will facilitate public interactions with the Recess community, as well as connections among intentional communities as identified by each artist. Our hope is that these engagements provide an opportunity for mutually beneficial exchanges that not only refine the artists’ thinking, but that challenge dominant narratives and activate new forms of artmaking.
About Recess
Recess partners with artists, youth, writers, and their chosen publics to create transformative cultural experiences.
Our programs welcome radical thinkers to imagine and shape networks of resilience and safety. By challenging dominant narratives and activating new forms of creative production, Recess defines and advances the possibilities of contemporary art.
Recess is free and open to the public to serve as a meeting place to generate art, ideas and actions.
Support our mission.
Event venue & nearby stays
Recess, 46 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, United States
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