Five years after US troops abandoned Bagram Air Base, the trash they left behind has arrived in New York. The artist Aziz Hazara spent that stretch navigating sanctions, shell companies and smuggling routes to ship the waste back, and the result, "Aziz Hazara: Coming Home," is now on view at SculptureCenter through December 28.

Hazara first documented the detritus in his video installation I Love Bagram (2025), commissioned for last year's Sharjah Biennial and named for the online military forum www.ilovebagram.com. Its scenes show scrap workers sifting through what looks like endless refuse, played on monitors the artist reclaimed from the site itself. SculptureCenter director Sohrab Mohebbi had originally commissioned the shipping work for his 2022 edition of the Carnegie International, where curator Muheb Esmat interviewed Hazara in the catalog. The arrival took until now.

America's longest war ended abruptly in August 2021. After 20 years of fighting, US troops withdrew from Afghanistan in a manner described as "disastrous" even by a congressional investigation. The Taliban's return was swift, and soon millions faced famine as foreign aid was cut off, sanctions locked in and Afghan assets were frozen. At Bagram, troops left an ocean of garbage in their wake.

The delays did not weaken the work. The objects accrued meaning as they traversed various systems. What might read as a clever return-to-sender gesture becomes, in the gallery, a brutal portrait of life under sanctions and of the supply chains and shell corporations war leaves behind. "The empire is basically made up of containers and subcontractors," Hazara said, speaking over Zoom from his studio in a former GDR Central Intelligence building in Berlin.

He purchased the trash from a market called Bush Bazaar, set up by American troops to sell odds and ends. "It's where you'd go if you wanted to buy something like hot chocolate," he explained. On view at SculptureCenter are encrusted tea kettles, dated scanners, camo knee pads, "Ortho gauze" bandages, coasters with inspirational messages, two worn insulated body bags, computer monitor stands, and a refugee housing tent folded like a tarp.

The first object to make it from Bagram to New York was easy to smuggle in a carry-on: a butt plug, its playful purple hardly visible beneath the grime. Other pieces traveled circuitous routes through Pakistan and Dubai, or the Baltics and Central Asia, before reaching Hazara's new home in Berlin.

For Hazara, supply chains—arguably his main material—"are a very imperial thing, so how do you subvert that?" His answer was to run them backward, reverse engineering the routes and shell corporations that brought American goods to Afghanistan in the first place. For the Sharjah Biennial, he showed documents he says trace shell companies set up to serve the American military since the Bosnian War if not earlier, and which continue today in Ukraine. To avoid bad branding, the companies repeatedly changed their names; mimicking them, and for his own legal protection, Hazara changed the names once more.

"It's like what Julian Assange said," Hazara explained, invoking the WikiLeaks founder: "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war." The last time the United States had a multiyear break from armed conflict was 1935–40.

Hazara has subverted imperial tools before: for the most recent Whitney Biennial, he donned night-vision goggles—a technology that matured during Operation Desert Storm—to photograph the moon.

Humor, he insists, is a survival strategy. "How can you deal with it except by making fun of it?" he said, describing Kabul as a "pretty funny city." The joke when the Americans arrived, he recalled, was: "These settler colonists are coming here to teach us democracy."

Asked whether repurposing the trash might carry a glimmer of hope, he balked: "We cannot make a life out of American garbage." He stipulated that the trash must stay in "Uncle Sam's house" and never be sent back.

In Afghanistan, tons more waste still fester. On the last nights of the occupation, troops burned more than 400 tons of waste in open-air burn pits, including hazardous batteries and paint, crusting the earth in carcinogens. Hazara says that now "in every Afghan household, someone has cancer"—though healthcare shortages leave cases uncounted or undiagnosed. "And we're the ones who get the lecture on human rights!" he exclaimed, before clarifying: "This is not a project from the position of victimhood… it's about pointing out the hypocrisy." As the exhibition makes plain, the war's residue did not leave with the troops—it is still moving, container by container, through the world's back channels.