Osman Khan’s Road to Hybridibad
After encountering a couple of fellow travelers, visitors to Stamps Professor Osman Khan’s new, immersive installation exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art will come face to face with a fantastical barrier: Blocking their entry to the next part of the gallery is a large, animatronic djinn head. Equipped with speech recognition software, the supernatural gatekeeper requires a password to continue into the mystical Hall of Djinns and along Khan’s Road to Hybridibad. Those who manage to solve his riddle continue inside while everyone else is redirected to a nearby library in search of clues.
“It’s a play on the idea that, for many immigrants, having access or entry means having a certain type of knowledge in order to enter,” Khan said.
An immigrant’s tale filtered through multiple lenses, Road to Hybridibad is a delightful, dense world of mashed-up references and wordplay — merging timeless folk tales and epics with today’s headlines, ancient imagery with modern tech “magic,” and clever allusions to Eastern and Western symbols and pop culture. For Khan, it’s a mythical space of hybrid identity, stuffed full of multitudes and informed simultaneously by the likes of Samuel Beckett, the One Thousand And One Nights, and the golden age of hip hop. It’s also a natural progression of the technology- and identity-based work he’s been doing at home in Michigan for several years now, with an emphasis on using all of the above to examine how narratives are shaped, as well as how we can reshape them.
On The Road
In many ways, the journey mirrors his own. Khan and his family immigrated to New York from Pakistan when he was very young.
“To some degree, it comes out of my own identity; I grew up listening to hip hop and qawwali, eating curry and pizza,” he said. “So what does this new kind of hybridity mean? Growing up, identity was a complex thing. I’m not Pakistani enough. I’m not American with enough. The Road to Hybridabad is a journey into accepting hybrid identity as authentic.”
The exhibit begins with a video of characters Ghazi, Urdu for a holy warrior, depicted with a tiger mask and referencing the Tiger of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, an 18th Century Indian Emperor who stood up to the British Colonialist, and Qazi, Urdu for judge, hooded and sporting an orange jumpsuit evocative of prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. Passionate Ghazi and logical Qazi also easily translate as two sides of any personality (“One could argue it’s actually one person having a conversation,” Khan said), and these two travelers set the stage for the migrant’s journey in a scene reminiscent of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”
In the “Re-Reading room,” visitors can browse books and other texts that influenced the show or listen to a new tale by a robotic AI orator who generates and shares a different story daily. Powered by artificial intelligence trained on immigrant stories of living in the United States, Khan’s creation is an AI take on Scheherazade, who, in the legend of the One Thousand and One Nights, starts a new story every evening for her new husband, the king, in order to postpone her execution the next morning. Observant viewers will also find the missing knowledge needed to proceed through the exhibit in this space via a “modified microfiche machine that works like a Ouija Board, summoning knowledge from dead medias.”
Magical Aspirations
Inside the Hall of Djinns — a race of powerful, supernatural beings in Islamic lore that, in the West, evolved into wish-granting “genies” — is what Khan calls the “fantastical space” of the show. The forest of “totemic” utility poles contains a model moon lander, equipped with coin-operated Buraq — which Khan describes as a “mythical creature that transported the prophet Muhammed (Isra’) from Mecca to Jerusalem on his journey to heaven (Mi’raj)” — and a massive bird cage shaped like the Taj Mahal that contains drone-driven flying carpets.
Blending mythic powers and modern technology are another of the show’s recurring themes, and an exploration of science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, stating that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Khan was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020 for his proposal to tell folktales of South Asia and the Middle East with a “contemporary technological twist,” which eventually grew into one thread of Road to Hybridibad.
“It’s arguing that all that magic found in these tales was the aspirational technologies of those people,” Khan said. “They’re pre-colonial imaginaries of technology, but interestingly enough, we can realize them now. Think about it: in the tale, Ali Baba goes, ‘Open sesame!’ and the mouth of the cave opens, right? Now we are talking and asking Siri to perform various deeds for us, or like Scheherazade, AI algorithms generate new imaginations at every prompt. So, I am reimagining these old tales using contemporary technology lensed through contemporary concerns. For example, the flying carpets are caged because they use drone technology, which for many communities are killing and surveillance machines; so they’re depicted as wild and dangerous animals and not like Aladdin’s domesticated friend (in the original tale, the carpet doesn’t fly but instantly transports the owner). So like all storytellers, I am putting my twist in retelling them.”
Breaking Down Walls
Continuing along the road, exhibit travelers encounter another obstacle, this time a wall. Modeled after the physical barrier between Palestine and Israel, Khan said it is both the specific and any/every barrier that keeps a people out. This particular wall appears to have been blown open by a loud sound system installed on the back of a pick-up truck, harkening back to the Biblical story of Joshua and the Israelites toppling the walls of the city of Jericho with the sound of their horns.
Sound is also helping Khan break down walls at home in Detroit, where he has lived and kept his studio since 2017. There, he and collaborators have been working to blend brown voices into the story of a city that has historically been told mostly in Black and White.
“There’s a large Latin population, there’s a massive Arab population, you have South Asian residents, and their narratives aren’t really being percolated quite the same way,” he said. “I see my role as an artist being bringing the immigrant narrative to that space.”
Part of that work has included forming a band inspired by the tradition of Islam and jazz. In 2023, the Astro Mystic Sama Ensemble —- “explores ideas of sonic hybridity, where Eastern and Western musical traditions, electronics and analog, all of that sort of mix in a fun way,” Khan said — performed at Detroit’s historic Scarab Club as part of the longrunning Concert of Colors, along with Zahra’tul Madinah, an all-woman Qasidah group also from Michigan.
Years before the band, Khan began exploring his Pakistani immigrant identity — and hybridity — in his own work, partly in response to how moving to Michigan made him more aware of it and partly because he only saw the narrative being told one way. For his “Indus Truck Works” project, Khan started a company to decorate nondescript American box trucks in the colorful, detailed style of Pakistani trucks, which could also be rented as transport vehicles. In the 2013 gallery exhibit “On Which Side Were the Barbarians,” Khan responded to a 2012 Newsweek cover story on “Muslim Rage” with a divided space exploring Muslim and Pakistani identity politics, along with Western perceptions and interference. The installation was both celebratory and somber and meant to raise more questions than answers.
More recently, Khan worked with Sally Howell, Professor of History at UM-Dearborn, and photographer Razi Jafri, on an exhibition series about Muslim visibility in and around Detroit. “Halal Metropolis” traveled around Southeast Michigan to explore “facts, fictions, and imaginaries of the Muslim populations in this region” between 2019 and 2021. Before Covid hit, there were plans to create an artist residency in Detroit, but during the height of the pandemic, it was decided to donate it to a family in need instead.
Not Going Back
Near the wall in Hybridibad, there’s a video of a burning Mediterranean fishing boat, which Khan said references the story of Umayyad General Tariq ibn Ziyad who burned his troops’ boats when invading Spain, giving them no choice but to courageously proceed forward. This sentiment is shared today by many migrants who flee impossible conditions, including via boats like this one, but also the perils of making a home in a new country.
“It mirrors the contemporary condition of an immigrant — they have out of necessity or force left their homes, and on arriving ‘burned’ their boats, they are not going back — but it can also make you think about the immigrants who have died on these journeys,” Khan said. “It can be read as both heroic and tragic.”
Beyond the wall, visitors enter “The Oasis” — a “land of milk and honey,” complete with a life-sized butter cow that could be at home at any American state fair, but here in the image of a breed from South Asia, along with a honey-spewing water fountain and grocery shelf full of “milk”- and “honey”-related products, from the literal to the absurd, where this land’s plentitude borders on perversity.
In his own journey, Khan said he has come to think of himself as “authentically Hybridabadi” today. “My identity is not defined by faraway Pakistan or someone else’s America but by my own depictions. Identity is a constant negotiation between my many experiences,” Khan added. “It’s always being rearticulated, but it’s also always authentic.”