About this Event
Join Khajistan and artist and educator Umber Majeed for an interactive, hands-on workshop centered on the newest version of the Khajistan Portal.
Participants will explore the digital archive through metadata, regional tags, translations, and connections between materials. Together, we’ll test how the Portal organizes and makes its collections accessible, then bring materials from the digital archive into the physical space through printing, collage, and other forms of hands-on engagement.
The Khajistan Portal connects a Reading Room of digitized books, magazines, comics, and periodicals; a Screening Room of films and moving-image media; and a Born-Digital Archive of memes, images, videos, and social media materials collected from across the Middle World. A mapping tool allows visitors to move geographically through these collections while tracing connections across language, format, subject, and time.
No prior knowledge of Khajistan or its archive is required. Familiarity with languages, places, media, or cultural references represented in the collections is welcome, but not necessary.
𝗨𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝗠𝗮𝗷𝗲𝗲𝗱
Umber Majeed (b. New York, 1989) is a multidisciplinary visual artist and educator. She received her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design in 2016 and graduated from Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan in 2013. Her writing, performance, and animation work engage with familial archives to explore Pakistani state, urban, and digital infrastructure through a feminist lens.
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.
Visit Thursdays - Saturdays, 12-5pm
46 Washington Ave. Brooklyn, NY 11205
Either the artist or Recess staff will be available to view the project in process.
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.
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Recess, 46 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, United States
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