Saad Khan Archives the Detritus of Censored Culture
Hyperallergic profiles New York-based archivist Saad Khan and his project Khajistan, a digital and physical archive and independent press devoted to censored, banned, and overlooked mass media from South Asia to the Maghreb. Founded in 2019 from images and videos Khan collected for film projects, Khajistan presents meme-like and found imagery on Instagram and aims, in Khan’s words, to “preserve real life that somehow disappears from the official record.” Khan, who grew up in Lahore in the 1990s and early 2000s and moved to the United States in 2014, describes collecting as a way to contextualize identity and preserve working-class, queer, and trans cultural expression often pushed to the margins. The article says Khajistan’s social media presence is largely built from about 85,000 community contributions and recounts a visit to Khan’s Queens apartment last fall where the archive’s themes are reflected in his physical collection.
From This Briefing
This story was covered in Tech Takes the Stage, Icons Under Fire