Osman Khan, Newspapers: Poem, Pattern, Pissed, 2024

This edition by Osman Khan is featured in his exhibition Road to Hybridabad. It is made up of a suite of 3 newspapers, titled Poem, Pattern, and Pissed. 

Poem uses a copy of The New York Times to recreate Emma Lazarus' poem "The New Colossus," which is mounted at the base of the Statue of Liberty. (The paper is from the date of Khan's immigration from Karachi to New York.) Pattern redacts an early 2000s copy of the New York Times from shortly after 9/11 with motifs drawn from Islamic design, leaving legible only an article about "counterterrorism" surveillance, which often targets people of Middle Eastern descent. Pissed replaces the text from a February 1917 copy of the Detroit Times with a repeating "1001" - a reference to both binary code and the story collection One Thousand and One Nights - leaving visible only a blurb about the passage of the Immigration Act of 1917, part of a turn towards nativism in the U.S. 

Road to Hybridabad  is curated by Alexandra Foradas on view at MASS MoCA from August 24, 2024 April 7, 2025. 8 pages, 27.5 x 19.5.