(This book will ship on 3/3/25). Osman Khan’s work plays with and subverts the materiality behind themes of identity, migration, and decolonization of knowledge and technologies through participatory and performative installations and site-specific interventions. This book–Khan’s first monograph–chronicles his major exhibition Road to Hybridabad, at MASS MoCA, within his larger practice, gathering writings by thinkers who share an interest in decolonization, hybridity, and the role of storytelling in shaping identity.
In Road to Hybridabad, Osman Khan re-reads the magical and fantastical figures found in folktales and lore from South Asia, the Middle East, and other Muslim and immigrant traditions. Khan interprets these figures through contemporary technologies and concerns: this new body of work includes an animatronic djinn, drone-operated flying carpets, a wall-destroying sound system/cannon, and a storytelling Scheherezade AI. Khan’s wryly funny work invites us on a journey across borders, through time, and between legend and history, encouraging us to reconsider — and perhaps rewrite — the narratives around identity, difference, and power reflected and recounted in the tales we tell ourselves.
The Thousand and One Nights is framed as a series of stories told by a young woman named Scheherezade to the king Shahryār in order to delay her execution. Each night for 1001 nights, Scheherezade relates the beginning of a tale to the king, who each day postpones her execution in order to hear her tell the end of the story the following evening, along with the start of a new tale. The Thousand and One Nights is the work of many authors: the stories shift with each retelling as they are adapted to new historical and cultural contexts, and shaped by authors’ interests, beliefs, and biases. (For example, “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp,” which was adapted for Disney’s 1992 animated film, was not part of the original text.) Road to Hybridabad reflects Khan’s own particular experience of identity formation — which, like The Thousand and One Nights, has been influenced by many histories and cultures–blending American, South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Muslim lores and visual references.
In Road to Hybridabad, Khan refracts mythical figures and tales like these through Arthur C. Clarke’s 3rd law, which theorizes that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Road to Hybridabad encourages a re-reading of the fantastical elements of folk narratives not as superstitious and fanciful, but rather as yearnings for as-yet-imaginary technologies from a pre-colonial cultural context.
MASS MoCA, 2025. Hardcover, 7.5 x 9 in, 20 pages
