Noor Tamari—To start us off, what is Khajistan?

Saad Khan—Khajistan was a word that always lived in me. It was, literally, a village near Herat in the 9th century. I learned about that much later in life, from an old Persian book called Hudud al-’Alam (Boundaries of the World), written by an anonymous author in what is now Afghanistan. My mother is Pashtun, so some of it was personal meaning-making and some of it was metaphysical. Living in Lahore, I knew people like me had lived before, but I had no record of them: how they spent their time, what amused them, how they played and loved. Today, what Khajistan has become is an online space for the region where we keep that kind of thing, so the next person doesn’t have to wonder as I did.

Joey Chriqui—It began with things that can’t necessarily live on the internet, things that end up being censored, banned, or just completely eradicated from it. That was the seed that bore the fruit of what Khajistan is now: a repository of said banned, censored, and overlooked media. It came out of a genuine love for that material and just wanting to see more of it, to dig into the things people were curious about, loved, and lamented over.

SK–When we were working on our film, Showgirls of Pakistan (2020), we were dealing with a lot of born-digital media from Khawaja Sira communities, the third-gender people in Pakistan, and I think the name Khajistan has something to do with that as well. Khajistan is like this third place online, which hovers above the physical space where things not allowed to exist in the physical world can just exist.

JC–We ended up cultivating a way larger field of imagination beyond what was in Showgirls of Pakistan. With Khajistan, everything is on the same plane: religion alongside what people would call vulgarity, erotica, and propaganda.

NT—What does the logo of the pigeon represent?

JC—Like the name Khajistan, the meaning behind the logo came to us after. It started as more of an aesthetic thing, also representing Saad’s childhood and my years spent in New York where I would sit on the stoop and watch uncles building community around raising and racing pigeons. I’m realizing now that the pigeon as a logo is the perfect encapsulation of that overlap between our worlds: the world of New York, and “the middle world,” as we call it. There is also this natural overlap in the pigeon being the original messenger of information.

SK—Pigeons are the only animals I grew up around. My uncle had like 70 pigeons, we fed them millet. Pigeons and masculinity in the region are strongly correlated. Men show love and affection to their pigeons, and each pigeon, after every voluntary flight around the sky, chooses to come back to its keeper. Khajistan is looking at subcultures that emerge from segregated spaces, and much of our work focuses on male-segregated spaces because that is what we have and have had access to. I also see this as an East-West difference in how we look at pigeons: a pigeon in New York is considered a flying rat, whereas where I come from, pigeons are loved and have been both historically and in the present found in religious places such as shrines or mosques. What one person sees as very important and divine, and another sees as vermin, is interesting to me.

NT—Can you walk me through the process of collecting the different materials? How does this work get translated into knowledge formation?

SK—For the physical material, we work with collectors across the region. It’s an informal network of people communicating through WhatsApp groups, Telegram, and community portals in Urdu, Farsi, Arabic, Pashto, and other languages. We buy en masse and digitize the collection. We make books from the digital material and sell the physical objects to universities with paper conservation and climate-controlled storage, because the paper is often very bad and needs looking after. Those sales to special collections are what keep Khajistan running.

Other material comes from our own collections, like the book we published, Karachi, After Midnight. That was initially a dead HTML file of a diary blog that I downloaded when I was 13 because it mattered to me.

JC– I also had a blog from when I was 13 to 17, and when that website was shutting down, I downloaded the HTML.

SK– Joey was writing his blog at the same time as the author of our book. Even though one was in Philadelphia and the other in Karachi, they were saying the same thing. They were both talking about desire, pain, wanting, and yearning. People collect to contextualize their own existence, and that is what we see time and time again. Whether that record counts as knowledge is decided somewhere else.

In my lifetime, the knowledge about our part of the world has been produced by Ivy League and other big Western institutions and trickled down to our countries, and our own upper classes are the ones who parrot it to us. That shapes how we see ourselves because that knowledge is either colonial, or war propaganda, or at best one kind of knowledge standing in for all of it and all of us. It makes us look at our own people with a suspicion that feels borrowed. On top of that, you get the global tropes, where a burka is bad unless it’s on a girl skateboarding in a Depop commercial. Khajistan works on what sits underneath all of it: street press, vernacular material, printed or audiovisual, knowledge from the bottom up. We buy it, we digitize it, which really means rescuing it and storing it the way we can afford to, and then selling the physical material to the Ivy League schools. That is how the loop gets completed. The street material we pump into the Ivy League informs the stale epistemology of the region, and it trickles back down to the ruling and middle classes at home, the same people who had no use for it in the first place. Now they read it and write academic papers on it.

NT—A lot of your work, whether it is the memes you publish, the materials you archive, or the publications you produce, relies on a vernacular language. Who is your audience, and how important is legibility in your practice?

JC—We do this for us, to see ourselves in the world. People sometimes find it hard to bridge the worlds that Saad and I come from—especially when looking at Jewish histories in the region, which are often seen as entirely separate.

We are gathering the pieces of our shared history and trying to expand beyond the veil of institutional memory. Other people seeing themselves in this world is an incredible byproduct.

SK–My dad posts AI videos of women of different races reciting the Quran on his WhatsApp stories. They are marginally erotic, and acceptable under the guise of religiosity. I’ve never been able to pin him down. Is he Wahhabi? A liberal? An anarchist? A capitalist? I still don’t have answers. He’s living and surviving, and aren’t we all? Khajistan should be just as hard to pin down.

NT—Exhibitions seem to be the newest aspect of Khajistan. How does that add an additional dimension to the practice? What gets added and what gets sacrificed?

JC—The fact that Khajistan was born long before we segued into exhibition and institutional work allowed us to come in with a sense of who we are and what we do.

What gets added is 3D space. We dream of having a brick-and-mortar where people can come and sit, but it’s built up in the world of Khajistan, where everything has a very classic auntie aesthetic. It’s such a joy to take that private, personal thing and build physical spaces out of it. For example, a great deal of the things at Office of War Information came from my dad’s office. It’s a part of the play for sure. This is our sandbox, and this is us building our little castles.

SK—The point is not to be critical of the institutions; it’s to do things the way we want, without spending much energy on what they want from us. Conservative military people walk into the Office of War Information at Pioneer Works, and don’t feel the show is against them. I keep thinking about ninth-century Baghdad where Syriac Christians, Zoroastrians, Muslims, and Jews worked and translated old texts together. It wasn’t equality in a modern sense. The Christians did most of the translating, and they were paid for it, and the people paying wanted the medicine and the astronomy. Nobody was being tolerant. The knowledge got kept because someone needed it. Above all, it was trade. Some Greek texts exist today only because someone translated them into Arabic. We’re not telling you what any of it means: we keep it, we let it stay complicated, and people draw from it according to the lives they’ve lived. That work should keep happening whether or not you get institutional laurels.

NT—You end your manifesto with the sentence, Khajistan, let’s play. What does play look like?

JC—Because of the nature of our family stories, and the histories we come from, with all the pain, trauma, and displacement, you reach a certain point where all you have intact is your sense of humor. Historically, archival work has been very rooted in rescue and recovery, which is part of the nature of our work. However, instead of putting it in a glass box for observation, we take the material and have fun with it. We are very purposeful in the fun that we have.

SK—There was a meme that came out of Jordan during the current Iran-Israel-America war that is the perfect reflection of this. It is an image of a young man posing in front of a sky full of missiles. When there’s so much pressure, playing or making fun is just a way of coping. It’s a way of living. Life goes on even in war. What is that life? That life, along with other versions of it, is Khajistan. A lot of play is involved in it; that’s the only way we know how to deal with things.

JC—A lot of the time, the idea of who we are and what our cultures are becomes more of an abstraction than anything else. Khajistan is very much about lived, on-the-ground experience, and that involves humor and play.

NT—What role does publishing books have in the larger practice? What does it mean to be presenting your work at New York-based institutions such as the NY Art Book Fair?

SK—It is very important to interact with where you physically are, and we are physically in New York. And at the same time, we can’t distribute in our countries, which is also where New York comes in.

JC—We have seen how vast the internet is and how the internet itself is an ether. Things get lost, and we’ve witnessed that in our lifetime. As kids, we thought that everything could just live there. As more time passes, you see the internet’s breadth growing into something almost unsustainable in its archival capacity.

SK—Any big company can censor you, or take your stuff off the internet entirely. We’ve seen it happen. Our people, and I don’t mean the upper classes, have never had the chance to record themselves at all. When we were making Showgirls of Pakistan, the people we worked with recorded every single phone call, because they have no trust in the justice system and no expectations of it, that system is not for them. You have to be your own evidence. The recordings are the receipts. That is what we are doing too.

NT– What is next for Khajistan?

SK–We have been working on a reading room on the website for years where you can read the region’s periodicals and books from the last 100 years, the ones we have been acquiring and digitizing. We have scanned over a million pages so far, with much more to go. Khajistan is our stake in the new wells of knowledge people will drink from, and the reading room is where that actually happens. This October, we are opening a month-long computer lab at Recess Art in Brooklyn to test-ride it with the public.

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This interview was originally conducted in July 2026 and published on Art21.org on August 2026.

This interview is published as part of the partnership between Art21 and Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair. Stay tuned for additional interviews with participants of the NY Art Book Fair. The fair will be running from September 24–27, 2026 at MoMA PS1. More information can be found here: https://printedmatterartbookfairs.org/

For more interviews, films, and educational resources unlocking the world of contemporary art, visit art21.org or follow us on social media @art21.

Haimy Assefa—Precious’s work is so vast. They have the ability to express themselves through so many different mediums, and I love that their work communicates a level of freedom. At a glance, it can feel like the various mediums are in their own worlds, but I see them as layers that have a throughline. In sections of the film, we literally layered Precious’s work, so you could see how the poetry, the gardens, the drawings, and the stuffed animals all build on one another.

Throughout the process of making this film, the idea of ‘seeds’ emerged as a beautiful motif. Precious talks about their poetry being a seed that then inspires so much of their artwork. They think of themselves as a seed that’s been planted in so many different places, having moved from Nigeria to the UK, and then to the US. They also speak about their grandmother, whom they call a seed saver, taking seeds from one place to the next, so that their family could have a little piece of home wherever they are. I really love the concept of these seeds that we cultivate becoming other things, and it makes an appearance throughout the film.

When I started working on this project, thinking about how it would look and feel, one of the things I was most excited about was trying out a framing that has been living in my head for years, where the participant lies down and looks up, speaking directly to the camera. There are very few situations where that makes sense to do in a documentary, but once I got to know Precious a little bit and knew that the film would build to their installation at the 2026 Whitney Biennial, I decided to have them lying down on a futon surrounded by dozens of stuffed animals that they were working with.

I love that so much because it really captured the implied sweetness and innocence that Precious is communicating about in their work with the stuffed animals, the concept that cuteness can often be accompanied by violence. There is a destructive element to making the stuffed animal works. They are taking apart stuffed animals, putting them back together, and adding taxidermied wings to make something new. In the film, we tried to represent the tension of ripping apart these symbols of comfort, sweetness, and innocence using quick cuts and sound effects of tearing and cutting, then showing the “angels” (as Precious calls them) swaying ever so gently from the ceiling.

I think there’s something so interesting about the juxtaposition between innocence and violence that they’re creating with their work, and I hope the pace and movement of the film invite the audience into Precious’s world and encourage viewers to think about things that represent innocence differently.

Watch the full film below or at Art21.org

For more from Art21 filmmakers:

• On Wednesday, August 19th, the latest New York Close Up film “Jordan Strafer’s True Stories,” directed by Art21 producer Andrea Yu-Chieh Chung, premiered on Art21.org and YouTube.

• Art21 filmmaker Lydia Cornett’s (director of “Sincerely Yours, Hadi Falapishi”) latest short film “Test Tracks” is selected to have its U.S. premiere at the Camden Film Festival following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

• Art21 filmmaker Jonna McKone (director of IRL/url films featuring Neïl Beloufa, Jacky Connolly, Julien Creuzet, and Ho Tzu Nyen) produced the feature film “To Use a Mountain,” which is having a theatrical run at the DCTV in New York City

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In 2017, we traveled to Negros, a sugar plantation island in the Philippines, to begin a research project. This was our first trip to the island together, though Enzo has been going there regularly since childhood to visit his mother’s family. Our intention was to study a midcentury Catholic mural painted by the queer, Filipino-American modernist Alfonso Ossorio, which is located inside a workers’ chapel within a sugar mill compound. Known as The Angry Christ (1950), the mural is a flaming, psychedelic depiction of Christ that feels especially unorthodox within the island’s monocrop landscape. The explosive presence of The Angry Christ intrigued us. We didn’t have a specific plan of what we wanted to make out of our research, only a basic idea to read the mural through the lens of the surrounding plantation environment.

The first public manifestation of our project was presented for an exhibition at the NTU Center for Contemporary Art in Singapore in late 2018, which was accompanied by an artist lecture. In the exhibition space, we reproduced a segment of The Angry Christ as a charcoal outline traced directly onto the wall, overlaid with hand-painted textual fragments taken from research we had been doing on both Ossorio and Negros. Using the composition of The Angry Christ as a scaffolding, our wall drawing brought out intersections and parallels between the sociopolitical history of Negros and Ossario’s life and practice. It wasn’t a fully developed work, and we thought of it as a mural-sized sketch, or set of lecture notes as a way to organize our thoughts.

A few months after this show, we returned to Negros and took a paper-making workshop at a small community center, located in a coastal neighborhood in a city called Sagay. The workshop was primarily offered for women in the community, mostly wives of fishermen, but we were invited by the organizers who knew that we were visiting artists interested in local cultural organizing. We were struck by the simplicity of the process and how it could allow for so much material experimentation, with the possibility of incorporating almost any kind of plant matter into the paper pulp. Immediately after this first workshop, we began making paper compositions using fiber from sugarcane and other local plants. This ended up being a formative experience for us, and is a practice we have continued up to today. Every time we’re in Negros, we forage for plants outside or go to the market to collect vegetable and fruit scraps from vendors in order to make paper.

It was around this time in 2019 that we were also starting to grapple with the extent of oppressive violence on the island. A brutal massacre had taken place in Sagay in October of 2018, just months before we arrived in the city. A group of farm workers had set up a protest encampment on a piece of plantation land and were ambushed by armed men who murdered nine of the farmers. Just a few weeks later, the human rights lawyer who was working with the victims’ families was assassinated. These events made clear to us the real foundation of the plantation system: deadly violence enacted by the state and large landowners.

It was a lot to confront, and it pushed us to learn about the various forms of political resistance on the island. One practice that we became particularly inspired by is bungkalan, a protest action taken up by Filipino peasants and farm workers who have been deprived of their legal claim to land redistribution. In response, they occupy parcels of disputed plantation land and collectively grow rice and vegetables. Unfortunately, these acts of guerrilla farming are regularly subjected to the most brutal forms of repression. In fact, the victims of the Sagay Massacre in 2018 were setting up a bungkalan site at the time of the attack.

Our political awakening that began in Negros coincided with a growing interest amongst cultural workers in the Philippines to stand in solidarity with peasants and farm workers during a time of increasing militarized violence in the countryside. In 2017, a group of Filipino cultural workers established SAKA (Sama-samang Artista para sa Kilusang Agraryo), an anti-feudal alliance of artists advocating for agrarian reform, rural development, and food security. One of SAKA’s major initiatives was to help set up a bungkalan site on a piece of agricultural land that was under threat of being developed in the middle of Metro Manila. With the guidance of experienced peasant leaders, SAKA artists would gather on weekends to farm with the local community, while continually campaigning for that specific community’s claim to the land. This is a form of culture-making that is difficult to make sense of according to the terms of the professional art and culture industry. Over the years, we have maintained a deep dialogue and exchange with SAKA, as well as other organizations that are part of the broader Filipino popular movement, which has helped us to rethink and reground our practice. We have also become active in political organizations working to support and advance the Filipino people’s struggle overseas in our respective cities of residence (Berlin and New York). While we make our living from the contemporary art industry, we no longer see it as the primary site of our cultural work.

The artworks in the current exhibition at MoMA PS1, produced between 2022 and 2024, should be seen as part of a wider, collective, cultural-political project that does not begin or end with the museum. Alongside a suite of new paper works, a light-based installation, and a short 16mm animation, the centerpiece of the exhibition is a newly commissioned, one-hour film entitled Langit Lupa (2023). Langit Lupa is our first attempt at making a documentary. It was a response to the political urgencies of the moment. Conceived in the build-up to the 2022 Philippine election, which resulted in Bongbong Marcos, the son of the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., claiming the presidency. The younger Marcos’s rise to power was the result of a years-long disinformation campaign around the history of the Marcos dictatorship, which made clear that the guarding of historical memory is a vital political task.

Our film centers testimonies from survivors of the 1985 Escalante Massacre, an incident of political violence that took place in Negros under the first Marcos regime. Early on in the process, we made the decision to avoid using historical footage in the film: we wanted to make sure that it was read as a film about the present and not strictly about the past, to address the continuum between the violence of that era and the incidents of violence happening in the present. Instead of historical footage, we combined the spoken testimonies with wide, sweeping landscape shots of Negros in the present. We also included extended 16mm segments in which bursts of luminous, plant-like forms fill the screen. These segments, which in some ways remind us of the explosive intensity of Ossorio’s Angry Christ mural, were created with an experimental phytogram technique that involves using processed plant matter to leave chemical traces directly on the analog film emulsion. We are influenced by experimental cinema, and the phytogram sections of the film were an attempt to utilize certain strategies from this tradition to agitate the viewer’s perception, so that the tensions and nuances in the survivors’ testimonies might be more keenly understood. Like the paper we make from foraged plants, the phytogram imagery draws out the relation between environmental and social struggles against a toxic plantation paradigm.

When we have screened the film for other activists in the Philippines, we have sometimes been questioned about our decision to lean into this kind of formal experimentation and not to include any archival imagery. We don’t deny the importance of making historical evidence visible, but we see this film as just one attempt to tell this story in a particular way, which should be part of a broader collective effort. It cannot be the only attempt, the only take, the only approach to this or any other subject matter of relevance to the movement. For us, it’s important to contextualize the work in this way: as one attempt to ascertain formal strategies, see what they’re able to do, and what they’re not able to do. Hopefully, that helps us and other comrades make future decisions about how to give visual forms to these kinds of narratives.

More and more, we see our art-making as part of a lineage of propaganda work, which we recognize as a necessary part of any effective political struggle. We’ve thought a lot about the tension between experimentation and accessibility, and Langit Lupa in particular was a self-conscious attempt to produce something that could be shared in both a contemporary art museum and a self-organized screening for farmers in the Philippine countryside. There is often anxiety for folks working in the professional cultural field regarding resolving the contradictions of political art-making in relation to institutional spaces and the capitalist marketplace in which these spaces are entangled. We think these questions are important, but aligning our work with the Philippine mass movement has given us a different perspective. The art world isn’t where these contradictions will be resolved because the context is already too compromised. The most important work happens elsewhere. But nonetheless, there are platforms here in the art world, and they do reach audiences.

After having the opportunity to tour the film and exhibition to Hong Kong, Berlin, Glasgow, and New York, we have not lost sight of the fact that this work was largely developed and produced while living in Negros for about five months, in the same small coastal neighborhood in Sagay where we took our very first paper-making workshop, and that the vast majority of our meaningful experiences there are not represented in the final artworks. We spent countless hours with the kids in the community who ended up performing in our film, as well as with their families, conducting art workshops, playing games, learning how to cook local dishes, chatting with them about dreams for the future as well as current struggles, and of course discussing our project. For us it was important to both communicate to them our intentions and to understand their relationship to the content. The question for us became: how to use every step in the artistic process to build a deeper shared understanding with an explicit purpose? A lot of contemporary art avoids the question of purpose and revels in ambiguity. For us, that has become less meaningful. More meaningful is dealing with concrete questions and collective goals, and allowing these questions and goals to guide artistic decision-making.

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In other Art21 news, the New York Close Up film “Jordan Strafer’s True Stories” premiered yesterday! Capturing artist Jordan Strafer and her cast and crew on the set of her latest video work–TALK SHOW (2026), which premiered at the 2026 Whitney Biennial–this short documentary traces the development of Strafer’s idiosyncratic sensibility, following the artist on deep dives into 1980s “Inner Child” pop psychology and 1990s erotic thriller aesthetics. For more interviews, films, and educational resources unlocking the world of contemporary art, visit art21.org or follow us on social media @art21.

Williams’ own artistic practice, gdubartista, focuses on place, attention, and presence. By engaging with these themes—on exhibition at Cafe Galerie in downtown Manhattan—she models a life of active exploration for her students. Her work is a testament to the idea that the classroom and the studio are interconnected places for expression.

Genavie Williams–Last year Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan sold for $6.2 million at auction. The sale left many people, my students included, bewildered by how a banana duct taped to a wall could sell for more than an Upper East Side penthouse. A little over a hundred years ago, Marcel Duchamp also provoked onlookers when, at a prominent art exhibit, he unveiled his new sculpture Fountain, a urinal signed “"R. Mutt.” Many people credit Duchamp’s piece as the beginning of the conceptual art movement. In conceptual art, the idea itself is the art. Exciting conversations about incorporating conceptual art into classrooms are at the forefront of art education. These conversations reimagine what it is to teach art in a contemporary landscape. This theory, while exciting, meets natural resistance in a classroom where students, families, and administrators are more familiar with traditional art forms. Contemporary art education calls for a critical engagement with ideas as well as the creative process. In this article, I share practical strategies for integrating conceptual art practices into the classroom.

The first step to teaching conceptual art is helping students to understand that the idea is the art. Oliver Herring’s Art21 film “TASK” is an interactive art piece you can bring into your classroom to help enforce this. His written instructions, reminiscent of Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, give the participant a short creative assignment. In Herring’s film, his party becomes a place where people are given permission to act creatively and connect with one another. His tasks can range from making yourself invisible to finding someone to play a game of tag with you. The playful nature of TASK elicits a range of ideas and reactions from people. See what kind of reactions you get when you allow students these same permissions! After a TASK Party it’s important to connect the activity to a larger understanding of conceptual art. You might have students discuss a closing question such as, “What are creative choices you made during the TASK Party?” or “What’s the difference between art and an idea?” Consider what questions are developmentally appropriate for the age group of students.

While it would be interesting to turn our classrooms into conceptual art fun houses, most schools value structure and measurable learning. Finding a balance between concept and technique helps to ensure you are nurturing the whole artist. In an attempt to achieve this, I incorporate an overarching question (or Big Question) for each of my projects. My hope is to help my students connect their art to a more abstract idea. Questions can be about identity, social justice, community, or anything else your students find meaningful. The question should be a touchpoint throughout the unit or lessons so that students are consistently engaged with it. I have students explore their big question while coming into class as a warm up, planning and reflecting. In my 7th-grade visual arts class, I explore abstract expressionism by using the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The techniques my students explore include mixing media, creating a balanced composition, and drawing Basquiat-style figures. After examining his work we discuss how Basquiat often conveyed messages of his emotions through his work. I challenge my students to express a feeling through imagery by prompting them with the question, “What is your experience as a middle school student?” As they interact with this question their newly learned technique is wielded through thoughtful answers. While not conceptual art in its purist form, helping students connect ideas to their artwork pushes them in the direction of making more meaningful art.

Simply looking and talking about contemporary art is an incredibly powerful way to engage students with conceptual art. This can be done in small doses and doesn’t necessarily require entire classes. Fifteen minutes before a field trip, I showed students bits of Guadalupe Maravilla’s Art21 film, “Mariposa Relámpago.” We discussed what motivated Maravilla to make a healing bus and how he uses his art to address pain in his community. Short and casual engagement with conceptual art helps acclimate students to the idea that art is living. It is more than a 2D or 3D form. Furthermore, I believe it’s helpful when artwork comes with context. One major complaint I hear about conceptual art is that people don’t connect to it—they see something and are unsure what they’re supposed to ‘get’ about it. We can help students make more meaningful connections by sharing stories about the artist, processes, or about the pieces themselves. Hyeree Ro invites us to see her process in her film, “Precise Ambiguity,” and recounts a road trip with her father. While Ro does not explicitly explain what their sculpture ‘is about,’ the context given by the film helps us to view the work in a way we might not have originally.

Anyone is capable of engaging with conceptual art. In its nature, conceptual art can be democratizing. Let’s let our students become a part of the discussion which has so far been saved for academics and curators. Resources such as Jorge Lucero’s book What Happens at the Intersection of Conceptual Art & Teaching? and Art21’s educator resources can be helpful in the continuation of this work. As art evolves may our classrooms evolve with it!

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In other Art21 news, the latest New York Close Up film, “Jordan Strafer Puts Truth on Trial,” premieres on August 19th at 12 pm EST! Capturing artist Jordan Strafer and her cast and crew on the set of her latest video work—TALK SHOW (2026), which premiered at the 2026 Whitney Biennial–this short documentary traces the development of Strafer’s idiosyncratic sensibility, following the artist on deep dives into 1980s “Inner Child” pop psychology and 1990s erotic thriller aesthetics. Tune in!

Ruba El Melik—Let’s start with Talitin, The Third (2024), an incredible performance piece in which you cover the Ragees Al-Aroos, the Sudanese bridal dance. Tell me about the conception of that piece and the story of its name.

Ahmed Umar—Talitin, meaning “the third,” as in “the third of the girls,” was an insult people had used towards me. It actually belongs to a phrase, ‘Talitin fil henna w al delka mkhalitin,’ meaning “their third who shares even in hennas and perfumed scrubs.” I heard ‘talitin’ a lot growing up, mainly because girls felt safe around me. I had found myself associated with that word since my childhood. Boys used to bully me with that word, but it also came from my mother, my father, and everyone else. I was bothered, but at the same time, they were right.

At around ten or eleven years old, my mother’s first cousin got married. It’s one of the most beautiful visual experiences I’ve had— the bride in her jertig attire, the sound of zaghareet (ululations), and the Adil w Al Zain processional song. After the wedding ceremony, my mom’s cousin danced the ragees aroos and at that point, I hadn’t seen a ragees aroos yet in my life. I eventually got kicked out of the room for being a boy, but I snuck off and ended up watching from the balcony. It was just so beautiful, so beautiful, so beautiful— the perfume, the zaghareet, the ‘Mashallahs!’

This memory is still so vivid inside me, it is also when I saw my mom dance ragaba. My mom wasn’t really a strict parent, but she was a hajja (a person who’d completed an Islamic pilgrimage), with social standing, equanimity, and a house that was open for hujjajs or pilgrims–a daughter of sheikhs. So I had never seen her dance much. When I saw her dance ragaba, my god, the experience was so beautiful. I was a short kid, and so my head came up to her hip. I would watch her body move, watch her looking up at the sky, her neck craning all the way back. It was so beautiful.

The ragees aroos are now very rare, and when they happen, there is no photography or documentation. It has been obstructed from the public sphere. Online, people often think this is not part of our Sudanese traditions, especially the younger generations who haven’t seen ragees much. The younger generation views it as a transgression of masculinity and our Sudanism. Historically, it was a public event— when my grandmother danced, the whole neighborhood attended, men, women, and children. She danced with her chest bare, wearing only the rahat, a Sudanese skirt. There used to be a tradition in which the groom would cut the rahat after the bride had danced, and immediately cover her with a piece of fabric. She would be completely naked for a fraction of a second, and this would be the transition ceremony from girl to wife.

These experiences stayed with me, and so when I heard of the Oslo World Festival, I wanted to present an international performance of bridal dance. I contacted a famous Sudanese singer who listened to my proposal, but soon afterward, her son prohibited her from going. After that, I tried to find another woman to film while she danced, but even that was very hard. I finally decided to do it myself, but I had a hard time finding a dance teacher to help me. People were even too ashamed to ask around for a dance teacher because they didn’t want to be associated with me, fearing others would say, “So-and-so brought me a gay guy to learn ragees.” It was really something.

REM—Did dancing alter your perspective of these women and traditions that you always felt a part of, but were forced to be away from? When performing Talitin, how did it feel to be in the center of a room, dancing for people, instead of having to watch from the balcony?

AU—I was so nervous, given all the background of the bridal dance and its cultural importance. Yes, I grew up surrounded by women, and I’m more in touch with my feminine side, but I’m not a female. Although I have some ownership of the tradition, it still had to be well thought out. There was a long period of thinking and discussing with the Sudanese musician Asia Madani, who taught me how to dance, alongside the Sudanese singer Alsarah. I was fully aware that after I danced publicly, I would face lots of consequences— how my position in Sudanese society would be affected, the opinions of my parents, and the online threats and danger that might come after. I haven’t spoken to my mom since the work went public.

But you know what? I had never believed Westerners when they said that they felt “connected to their ancestors” and all that until I danced. In that moment, I was completely connected to the singer, the music, the memories of older dancers, and my grandmother, who was really one of my favorite people. I felt this ancestral feeling. I feel it in every dance.

REM— I do feel like it’s difficult for your actual community, your audience, and your people to receive work that displays a level of freedom that people haven’t collectively arrived at yet. What actually sustains you to keep creating for an audience that could be upset with you when you create?

AU—I think with Talitin, I was really thinking of myself, my memories, and the question of, “Why did we get like this?” Our Sudanese identities are being eliminated. Most things that are pure Sudanese face hate because of Wahhabism1 and the Islamism2 of our culture. I know my Sudanese audience, what they think, and how they would respond. After premiering the work, I was looking for a specific comment, and I found it a lot— “He’s disgusting, but he’s one hell of a dancer.”

REM—There’s something almost erotic about the way that you create this juxtaposition within people. They’re watching something beautiful and are forced to acknowledge it, but at the same time, feel disgust or darkness.

In Truth Bears No Scandal (2024), you sing famous Sudanese songs to reassert their original queer context, which has been purposefully hidden over time. What compelled you to create this work and look into this archive of history and tradition?

AU—Truth Bears No Scandal is an Arabic saying, meaning something along the lines of what is clear and open has no shame. It is a very direct and truthful thing to say. So we have this proverb in our culture that everyone knows, but doesn’t really practice the message behind it, especially as it relates to queerness. Who hasn’t heard of queer songs, or of our existence as queer people in Sudanese society? We all know! Why do we pretend that we don’t? We know the cooks, the singers, and the neighborhood gay. We are present, but society is determined, with all its might, to eliminate our existence from the public sphere. Since I was a child, I noticed my father and older men saying, “This poet is… Oh, you know…” whenever they would talk about music. They’d hint at some sort of history they don’t want to talk about. When I grew up, I started hearing more and more phrases like, “Oh, did you know this singer was gay?” or “this poet wrote that song about a boy.”

Why are people enjoying our queer love with these songs? Men express their love to their women through our songs without crediting us or even seeing us as existing or worthy of existing. That was the idea behind Truth Bears No Scandal— we are here, what is the scandal with that? You’re enjoying our love and our love songs.

We landed on three popular Sudanese songs for me to sing. Actually, it’s very funny because the song ‘Mabrook Alaky il-leila Ya Naoomah’ (مبروك عليكي اليلة يا نعومة) was sung by a woman for a woman, and it’s widely considered part of Sudanese heritage, without many people knowing the history behind it. There is no archive for anything in Sudan, especially now that the television and radio infrastructure has been burned down. So this project was an interesting way to track and preserve some of that history.

Obviously, even after the work, you can’t say that this poet or this singer was a hundred percent gay, because their grandchildren today would get mad! So, we can say it is rumored that it’s queer, but sometimes it is very clear.

REM—I want to talk about the materials that you work with. What drew you to working with ceramics, sculptures, even textiles, and the materials that ended up becoming Glowing Phalanges (2023-ongoing)?

AU—My use of materials and everything I do has to go through a thousand “whys”— Why am I doing it? And what is the meaning of this material in this project, and why? What is the sense behind it? How does it help the story? I was never interested in specializing in a technique or a material; I was more interested in how to narrate my story in a sensible manner.

For Glowing Phalanges, my use of wooden sculptures began after I noticed ebony, ivory, and other valuable materials from Africa arriving in Norway as tourist souvenirs. I started buying these pieces one at a time, first for the sake of their material, like “this is ebony!” The same ebony that we use in Sudan to describe the beauty of dark-skinned women. It is so normalized that the wealthy come to Africa and hunt our wildlife without any regulations or consequences. This would never happen in any Western country. In Sudan, we used to have one of the biggest populations of African elephants. They’re almost gone now. The same with rhinos, the same with ebony.

I formed a collection of these souvenirs and started thinking about how these mass-produced objects are a very inauthentic representation of us. In addition to harming the environment, they harm the artists who have to make the same shape over and over, and the pieces don’t carry any specific meaning. They are made suitcase-sized and fed by the gaze of how the West wants to see us, women carrying pots in their heads with exaggerated features. Through a process I call “reauthentication,” I remove every trace of the past that these souvenirs have gone through and transform them into mediums of prayer, like Sufi prayer beads, in Glowing Phalanges.

REM—What do you feel like you’re reaching for when you create? Are you reaching for some kind of personal truth? Is it a goal of expression? Is it communicating to people?

AU—I am not someone who wants to live outside of Sudan. The more I live outside, the more I don’t think anybody deserves to leave home to feel comfortable, to live a comfortable life. I don’t like hypocrisy, but our society is based on it, and this hypocrisy is dangerous for us, our lives, and our freedoms. We could have just lived with our mutual existences, both of us, without me needing to leave to live abroad, without me having to be hurt, and without you having to experience anguish within yourself because a man loves another man, for example. I want to live in peace. It’s so cliché to say I want to live in peace. There are so many things where, if you just dig a little deeper, you’ll find that we are all the same. This world can take us all. Especially our Sudan, she can handle us all.

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In other Art21 news, two new Art21 films premiered this summer! The New York Close Up film “Precious Okoyomon’s Creative Destruction,” directed by Haimy Assefa, premiered on July 22nd, 2026. Just yesterday, on August 5th, 2026, the Extended Play film “Sable Elyse Smith: Turns Things Over,” directed by Crystal Kaiyza, premiered. For more interviews, films, and educational resources unlocking the world of contemporary art, visit art21.org or follow us on social media @art21.