During the US-led NATO occupation of Afghanistan from 2001–21, the American military established a complex multinational supply chain to sustain what resembled a suburban enclave around Bagram Airfield, near Kabul. The compound was complete with fast-food franchises, recreation centers, a boardwalk, swimming pools, and tax-free retail stores stocked with consumer goods. Aziz Hazara: Coming Home seeks to return material discarded in Afghanistan following the American military’s abrupt withdrawal.
Working with networks of local brokers, scrap dealers, and intermediaries who had long operated around the airfield’s waste economy, Aziz Hazara selectively gathered items ranging from kneepads and uniforms to electronics, exercise equipment, recreational tools, kitchenware, tents, and fragments of infrastructure. The task required navigating bureaucratic ambiguities, political instability, and shifting regimes of surveillance, all while assembling and cataloging the material. While most of the discarded items were absorbed into local markets or appropriated by the new government, Hazara preserved a small portion of objects to return to their place of origin, reversing the logistical route that brought them to Afghanistan.
Hazara’s work is an archaeology of what is left behind after war ends. At SculptureCenter, the hundreds of items comprising Coming Home offer a glimpse into the material remnants of a war waged on the other side of the world. The objects record everyday life in a military outpost, bringing into focus the massive human, environmental, and material dimensions of a conflict that Americans primarily experienced through images. Although the exhibition consists of debris—discarded objects from a distant site—it serves as an active and durational engagement with the simple gesture of return, complicated by the infrastructure and legacies of US intervention.
The presentation at SculptureCenter will mark the first time the full body of collected material has been shown. In a moment when the war in Afghanistan is once again being reassessed in light of subsequent conflicts, Coming Home brings its legacy into the public view.
SculptureCenter