Since 2021, Khajistan, the archive and publishing platform founded by filmmaker and archivist Saad Khan, has preserved and digitized censored, banned, and underrepresented media from a geography spanning North Africa to South Asia. Khajistan reveals what modern knowledge systems leave out.
Office of War Information (O.W.I.) takes its name from the U.S. government agency founded during World War II to manage public perceptions of the war through news, films, posters, and leaflets, at home and abroad. In this installation, that machinery of messaging is reimagined as an office in decay: printers continually produce copies of American military propaganda leaflets distributed across Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya between 1990 and 2022. Computer terminals invite visitors to explore a digital archive of these leaflets and their translations. Extending back into history, the exhibition traces the enduring military actions enacted by the United States against foreign nations.
Outside this office recreation, a selection of original US war propaganda ephemera including leaflets dropped over Japan during World War II is displayed, linking contemporary conflicts to earlier campaigns of psychological warfare. Shifts in graphic style and rhetoric become visible in the installation, yet an underlying logic remains constant: wars are framed as reluctantly waged, necessary, and even humane. Operating as both a bureaucratic machine and an archive, Office of War Information (O.W.I.) shows how language and design are used to justify war in advance.