Image: Aziz Hazara, Coming Home, 2026, process documentation. Courtesy the artist
SculptureCenter will present Aziz Hazara’s ‘Coming Home’ in Long Island City from September 19 through December 28, 2026, curated by Sohrab Mohebbi, Director. The exhibition is part of the institution’s fall opening, which also brings new solo presentations by Cevdet Erek and Yining Fei.
The project addresses the material aftermath of the US-led NATO occupation of Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021. SculptureCenter describes how the American military built a multinational supply chain around Bagram Airfield, near Kabul, sustaining what resembled a suburban enclave with fast-food franchises, recreation centers, a boardwalk, swimming pools and tax-free retail stores.
After the abrupt American withdrawal, Hazara worked with networks of local brokers, scrap dealers and intermediaries long active in the airfield’s waste economy to gather recreational tools, kitchenware, tents and fragments of infrastructure. The institution says the task meant navigating bureaucratic ambiguities, political instability and shifting regimes of surveillance while assembling and cataloging the material. Most discarded items had been absorbed into local markets or appropriated by the new government; Hazara preserved a portion to send back to their place of origin, reversing the logistical route that had carried them to Afghanistan.
SculptureCenter frames the work as an archaeology of what is left behind after a war ends, with the objects bearing witness to everyday life in a military outpost and to the human, environmental and material scale of a conflict experienced outside Afghanistan largely through images. The presentation will be the first time the full body of collected material has been shown.
The exhibition opens with a reception on Saturday, September 19, from 2 to 4 p.m. at SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, NY 11101, shared with Erek’s ‘Americas’ and Fei’s ‘Feral Sediment’, both also on view through December 28. The three are presented as separate solo exhibitions within the fall 2026 program rather than as a group show.
Hazara was born in 1992 in Wardak, Afghanistan, and works across photography, video, sound and multimedia installation, with recurring concerns around surveillance, material culture and supply chains. He has shown at the 16th Sharjah Biennial (2025), the 18th Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement in Geneva (2024), the 58th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (2022), the Busan Biennale (2020) and the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020). His work is held by Tate Modern, S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, KNMA in New Delhi, the Sharjah Art Foundation and the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Major support is provided by Patrick Collins, with generous support from the Teiger Foundation and additional funding from Carla Chammas and Judi Roaman.
SculptureCenter is closed for installation until September 19, when it resumes regular hours of Thursday through Monday, noon to 6 p.m. ‘Coming Home’ remains on view through December 28, 2026.
