Drone-operated flying carpets held captive inside a Taj Mahal–shaped cage; a mammoth head of the British colonialist Sir Cyril Radcliffe moonlighting as a djinn in charge of border control; and a robotic Scheherazade narrating AI-generated fantastical immigrant success stories. These are just a few of the many amusing elements in Detroit-based Osman Khan’s exhibition, “Road to Hybridabad,” at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. The Pakistani-born artist’s first institutional outing is a post-truth wanderlust of technologically ambitious, often participatory, creations that demystify Eastern tales and stereotypes of first-generation Southeast Asians and Muslims. “I believe in facts, but everything else is a story,” Khan told ARTnews. “History is a story; how I think myself is a story, which is empowering.”
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The exhibition, organized by the MASS MoCA curator Alexandra Foradas, presents the imaginary titular city as a land of discovery with multiple checkpoints of whimsy and political satire. Taking the role of a video game’s adventurous lead, the viewer embarks on a quest which echoes various high and low tropes, such as the hero’s journey in the Western canon, the stress of passing through the US customs with a Muslim name, and the phantasmic happenstances of Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian folklore. “Claiming back these tales and retelling them in a contemporary way moves them away from the Orientalist and exotic lens,” Khan said.
The current exhibition, the majority of which was fabricated at an onsite production facility with the assistance of the museum’s in-house team, builds on Khan’s previous history with MASS MoCA. He participated in its residency program in 2019, as well as the 2020 group show, “Kissing through a Curtain,” in which he showed a multimedia sonic sculpture of a 17th-century Mughal emperor’s peacock throne paired with components from Indian musical frameworks of raga and taals. Offering a disruption to electronic music’s mainstream Western profile, the work created a daily “decolonial dance party” inside the museum at a time of strict pandemic-related social restrictions.
“I love the way he collages pop culture references with historical ones while he combines stories adhered to him from the US, Pakistan, and elsewhere because we are all made up of the stories attached to us as we move through the world,” Foradas said. For Khan, a multivalent way of chronicling the past and human existence defies what he calls the “empirical or the modernist truth.”
Khan’s aim is to reveal just how subjective history is by using civilizations-old oral traditions in which “passing on a story each time to someone else embellishes the tale and adds another experience.” By blending these traditions with the contemporary realities of immigration, colonialism, and social unpredictability, he shows us that the truth may not always be what it seems.
The journey Khan lays out in “Road to Hybridabad” includes a demure metal-bodied, malachite-colored Scheherazade, the mystic heroine and storyteller from the One Thousand and One Nights, in what the artist has called the Re-Reading Room, where she sits amid a layout of books, records, and DVDs that are instrumental in Khan’s practice. Among the over 400 titles included are Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States by Monisha Das Gupta, Ms. Marvel comics, and records from Habibi Funk label. Here, Scheherazade is AI-trained and largely reduced from human traits to a triangular form with dangling legs and a head, reminiscent of Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse (1910). A face-recognition feature activates her narration of immigrant achievements with fantastic twists as she makes direct eye contact with viewers. The tales in her repertoire range from newcomers transported to a promised land by a trinket to successful business owners helping their family members back in war-torn homelands.
Nearby, Sir Radcliffe, who determined the geographic separation between India and Pakistan in 1947, mutates into a 10-foot-tall blue djinn guarding the portal into the adjacent Hall of Djinn. A weekly-updated password, available on a nearby cork board as well as inside a microfiche machine, must be whispered into a tin can telephone to lift the horned creature’s entire face which operates as a portal to the next gallery. “Think of him as the TSA agent who prevents your entry,” Khan quipped. The magical unlocking power of a password also hints at the famous “open sesame” phrase in the tale of Ali Baba and 40 Thieves.
Once inside, expect a huddle of telephone poles associated with developing urbanism, a replica of the genie-housing, purple-hued bottle from the 1960s American sitcom, I Dream of Jeannie, and, perhaps most strikingly, a coin-operated kiddie ride in which the typical flamboyant equine is replaced by Mohammed’s flying horse, Buraq. The mythical winged animal, who hauled the prophet to Jerusalem, is place atop another ’60s artifact, Apollo 11, the spacecraft that first took humans to the moon. A history-changing travel—whether holy or cosmic—meets a theme park ride, no matter how immobile; a typical Hollywood western soundtrack accompanies this infinite back-and-forth.
The works in the show’s “Oasis” section alludes to the metaphor of the Land of Milk and Honey, both as a mystified place of abundance and America as its failed embodiment. A stainless-steel public water fountain yields honey in lieu of water, while a cow made out of butter salutes both the carved dairy figures typical in Midwestern state fairs, as well as the Brahma breed which is a cattle typical in Southeast Asia and imported to the US in the late 17th century.
In Khan’s easter egg–laden takeover, humor remains the binding sentiment, a key that unlocks tongue-in-cheek takes on humanity’s landmark moments of hard facts and superstitious assumptions. “Polemic work can be extremely powerful and poignant, but you either agree or disagree with it which means it might feel very closed,” Khan said about his open-ended humor, adding that it’s his way of “confronting deeper layers of an aesthetic experience.” His witty handling of objectively loaded issues carves out a “point of access,” with a clear intention to avoid “making light of any subject or diffuse its impact.”
Technology is a critical tool in Khan’s visually alluring, forthright satirical compositions. The 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, who quit a start-up job during the dot-com boom to pursue an MFA, considers folkloric magic of the tales he grew up with as “unrealized aspirational technologies.” He speculates that the “current technology is indeed finally catching up to the magic,” as evidenced by the amount of technical expertise and resources devoted to the exhibition by MASS MoCA.
This approach in fact furthers the artist’s overall project to decolonize technology with a humorous critique of its common execution. Inside the Taj-Mahal shaped cage, carpets in various sizes and patterns are occasionally risen up to the air by drones beneath them. “These are hobbyist drones, but even hearing the word ‘drone’ reminds many communities of killings,” he said. “A common mistake about technology is to assume it is objective. … I absolutely think technology is culturally derived although it argues itself not to be because of its ubiquity and the assumption that it derives from the Western culture.”
At a time when vitriolic anti-immigrant rhetoric has only increased both ahead of and immediately after the US presidential election, Khan hopes that this exhibition will offer a different way to think about immigration. “I am excited about the ways we are asking the public to think about immigration with nuance at a time of dangerous rhetorics,” Forada said.
Khan pointed to the show’s sole video work, showing a burning blue boat in reference to the apocryphal story of the Islamic commander Tariq ibn Ziyad’s landing in present-day Spain via Gibraltar. “He burned all the boats and told his soldiers they are never going back, so the only way to go is forward,” said Khan, who cocurates an exhibition series, “Halal Metropolis,” focused on Southeast Michigan, the US state with the largest Muslim population. “We are not going anywhere; in fact, immigrants keep small Michigan cities like Dearborn and Hamtramck alive—the only way forth is to be hybrid.”
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