Aruna D’Souza
In his new show, the artist hybridizes the wonders and terrors of technology with immigrants’ journeys past and present.
Osman Khan: Road to Hybridabad, installation view. Courtesy the artist and MASS MoCA. Photo: Jon Verney.
Osman Khan: Road to Hybridabad, curated by Alexandra Foradas, MASS MoCA, 1040 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams, MA, through April 2025
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According to legend, the tales collected under the title One Thousand and One Nights were created to defer the future: Scheherazade, a young queen sentenced to death, tells fabulous stories to her king, each one with a cliff-hanger so juicy that every evening he puts off her punishment so he can hear the ending the next day. But at the same time, the stories themselves—amassed across the reaches of the Islamic world starting sometime in the first millennium, and codified in their modern form by the eighteenth century—conjure, even welcome, different tomorrows: with narratives of travel across the cosmos, underwater civilizations, automata, and flying mechanical horses, the corpus contains all the trappings of science fiction.
Osman Khan: Road to Hybridabad, installation view. Courtesy the artist and MASS MoCA. Photo: Jon Verney.
Osman Khan, in his delightful and whip-smart exhibition Road to Hybridabad, on view at MASS MoCA until April 2025, leans into this futurism. Instead of treating the tales as mere myth or folklore from a long-distant past, he proposes understanding them as an oracular account of what was to come—a way of explaining the present-day world, in which so many are thrown into the diaspora, willingly and unwillingly, and the obstacles that situation presents. What if the djinns that guarded entries to longed-for places foretold our current border checkpoints and constant ID checks, or the flying carpets were the antecedents to military drones? Our contemporary mythologies—many of which emerged from Silicon Valley, with its promises of a technological utopia to come, and persist even now, well past their due date, thanks to the Elon Musks and Peter Thiels of our moment—are put to the test by those of the past, in which technology is the root of not only our most wonderful dreams but also our darkest horrors.
Osman Khan: Road to Hybridabad, installation view. Courtesy the artist and MASS MoCA. Photo: Jon Verney.
Khan takes over the first-floor galleries of MASS MoCA’s main building, creating a series of encounters that lead viewers on a hero’s journey—in which their passage symbolically echoes that of the contemporary immigrant. First up is a blue, ten-foot-tall, animatronic head whose mouth opens, ushering us into the large space beyond, but only after one whispers an ever-changing password, written on a microfiche in a nearby reading room, into a tin-can telephone, resembling the ones you played with as a child. This genie is not just a mythical gatekeeper, however—his face is modeled on that of Cyril Radcliffe, the man responsible for drawing the border that separated India from Pakistan when the British colonizers hightailed it out of South Asia in 1947, an act that resulted in the largest forced migration in human history.
Osman Khan: Road to Hybridabad, installation view. Courtesy the artist and MASS MoCA. Photo: Jon Verney.
Inside the guarded gallery, we find a cross between a Wunderkammer and an amusement park. Buraq, the winged horse with the head of a woman that carried the Prophet Muhammad to the heavens, is transformed into an oversize, mechanized, coin-operated children’s ride, like the kind you used to see in front of supermarkets. Appropriately, the horse sits atop another, modern vehicle to the heavens: a recreation of the Apollo 11 moon lander. Palm trees are transmuted into telephone poles and cell towers, some carved with intricate designs, and a large wrought-iron birdcage in the form of the Taj Mahal contains a flock of rugs that occasionally, and noisily, attempt to take flight, hovering thanks to drones attached to their undersides. Are we seeing wondrous entities cruelly confined—or, perhaps, given the role drones have played across Western Asia in the past decades, evil monsters stripped of their power?
Osman Khan: Road to Hybridabad, installation view. Courtesy the artist and MASS MoCA. Photo: Jon Verney.
Vitrines hold artifacts that nod to the Orientalist fantasies that have been projected onto the region and its peoples. These include what is identified as a replica of the genie bottle from the classic 1960s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie, which was made by Mario AC Della Casa, “the ONLY artist in history that had ever been endorsed by Sony Entertainment” to create official reproductions. Nearby is an excerpt of the script of Disney’s Aladdin (1992), cowritten and directed by Guy Ritchie. Wait, wut? Despite the archival tone of the display, with its glass library case and typewritten documents and careful listing of provenance, it’s hard to know whom to trust—especially because, as we learn from the object labels, they have been written by a “contemporary answer-providing djinn ChatGPT.”
Osman Khan: Road to Hybridabad, installation view. Courtesy the artist and MASS MoCA. Photo: Jon Verney.
Follow a faux stone wall down the Road to Hybridabad to a gallery where we find a video of a boat in flames on a beach. It evokes, on the one hand, the countless migrants who have tried to cross the sea in search of safety and solace only to succumb to the elements or to face repulsion by xenophobic states. Simultaneously, it recalls the legend of the eighth-century Umayyad commander Tariq ibn Ziyad, who ordered his men to burn the boats they had used to invade Spain, a display of commitment to staying and building new lives in this freshly conquered land. Nearby, a sound system mounted on the back of a pickup truck has seemingly blasted a hole through the stone wall, revealing a modern oasis beyond, what Khan has described in his writing as “a violent act made with the intangible.” We now enter a literal “Land of Milk and Honey,” complete with a drinking fountain that spouts the sweet nectar, a Brahman cow (a breed venerated in India) sculpted from butter and housed in a refrigerated glass display case resembling those in state fair competitions, and supermarket shelves laden with honey- and milk-flavored products (Honey Nut Cheerios, Krusteaz Honey Cornbread, Sweet Baby Ray’s Honey Barbecue Sauce, etc.). A setup in one corner allows us to take photos to mark reaching the promised land—shabby lawn chairs in front of a backdrop of a ramshackle tin shack. It’s both comical and tragic: This is what we all worked so hard to achieve?
Osman Khan: Road to Hybridabad, installation view. Courtesy the artist and MASS MoCA. Photo: Jon Verney.
The title of the show, Road to Hybridabad, is a reference to those Orientalist Bob Hope–Bing Crosby “Road to [Singapore, Zanzibar, Morocco, Utopia]” comedies from the 1940s, while “Hybridabad” is a play on Hyderabad, the name of two cities in South Asia, one in Pakistan and one in India. (The latter is a global center for the tech industry.) The theme of hybridity runs through the exhibition—not only because many of our most phenomenal imaginings and greatest terrors hinge on beings that fuse what should not go together (horses and women, carpets and birds, humans and machines, and so on), but also because (as Khan suggests) immigrants are also hybrids. Even our stories are hybridized—like One Thousand and One Nights, transmitted orally across borders and over centuries, told and retold in different contexts till their origins are as fuzzy as the original message in a game of telephone, and like the tales we encounter in the “Re-Reading Room” of the exhibition. Surrounded by books on wheeled carts, all of which contributed to Khan’s research for the show, is a boxy, pyramidal, AI-powered humanoid with tubular legs that sits on a wooden bench—Scheherazade 2.0. She (it?) has been trained on a data set of immigrant stories, which she then uses as the basis of new, mashed-up accounts of treacherous journeys undertaken in search of a safety and prosperity. If we hear our own experiences in these narratives, it is because we, too, are hybrids: the product of where we come from and where we go, extraordinary for our resilience and nightmarish (at least to fascists), too.
Aruna D’Souza is a writer and critic based in New York. She contributes to the New York Times and 4Columns. Her new book, Imperfect Solidarities, was published by Floating Opera Press this summer.