Areez Katki

This interdisciplinary artist and writer weaves together stories and meditations on politics, spirituality, art, sexuality, heredity and identity. Born into a Persian Zoroastrian family in India, Katki was raised in Auckland from age 11. He returned to India in 2018 for a 10-month residency to learn of his ancestry and the traditional textile and bead work practices of his foremothers; his subsequent textile work is tactile, intimate, and earnest. Katki avoids opulent Parsi brocades in favour of found or inherited hand-woven domestic textiles. These are embroidered with figurative or abstract marks; some are like pictograms, others, wandering lines. These vibrant vignettes contrast veins of culture and tradition, colonisation, displacement and diaspora, and contemporary queer identity. From the teachings of Parsi women artisans, Katki has created a language of his own.