Tell me the story
Of all the things.
Beginning wherever you wish, tell even us
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
In their attempt to posit questions around storytelling, Areez Katki’s chosen medium, a commitment to re-examine the efficacy a singular voice emerges: the voice of a protagonist who holds within themself a chorus of ancestral narrations. Sometimes harmonic, sometimes cacophonous, the multitudes emerging from this liquid archive can sing and soothe, allowing the figure to grow, and even appear fully formed in character. All the while, these voices might contradict, sting, glitch or violently turn on their host. This form of troubled storytelling could be seen as the central thesis in the artist’s multidisciplinary practice.
How to puncture the sky and hear the stones sing is the first chapter of a three-part exhibition series. This part has been organized like a redolent experience in three layers: top/middle/base. The artist’s novel is presented as an experiment here at Künstlerhaus Bethanien with a prelude of spatial, sonic and literary works. They parallel the microhistories, fragments and poetics that will culminate in an experimental novel that Areez Katki has been crafting for the past six years.
ما أفعله يشبه التطريز؛
حتى الزوج الأكثر دهاءً لن يلاحظ
What I do is like embroidery—
even the most cunning husband won’t notice
Jocelyne Saab
The artist’s apartment in Mumbai is an archive of disparate narratives that spans four generations from the matrilineal side of his family: the apartment’s current resident sits uneasy, chain smoking in their grandmother’s armchair. Memories are haphazardly poured into spatial encounters. Mediations with found and archived textiles now teem with hand-embroidery produced within the apartment. The textiles float as sculptural gestures that capture the artist’s labor, all the while evading time’s trickery—its linear strictures. Drawings from this series of embroidered works by Areez Katki carry images, fragmented annotations and questions concerning the multiplicity of voices channeled through a maze of citations. Abstracted diagrams based on an ancient Avestan maxim float alongside fabular portraits of elemental deities from the Zoroastrian pantheon; a Disney villain who conjured the artist’s fear of the color purple is nestled among mythic retellings from Ferdowsi’s epic poetry; autofictive microhistories spill beyond the pictorial and into the abstract. A shorthand, inspired by the artist’s mother’s work as a stenographer, is being invented and embroidered on cloth. Areez Katki’s visual language has been synthesized to carry stories with the ethics of love, while stirring identities and languages into swirls of queer enfleshement. Like thoughts from a troubled mind, and memories from a complicated past, they hang in disarray—suspended delicately and held up to scrutiny.
The practice of love offers no place of safety.
We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon
by forces outside our control.
bell hooks
The artist’s grandmother, Thrity Lakdawala, fed birds at dawn every morning, regardless of the geographic or architectural parameters of her life, spent between SWANA, India and Oceania. Thrity awoke at dawn and fed her birds in a ritual that she claimed allowed her to commune with higher beings. Areez Katki cites this ritual as one of his inheritances today. A new work titled, Disjecta Membra: Series D, features four soundscapes in a two-channel installation that lingers between folds of cloth in the exhibition space. The base of each track is a field recording of dawn choruses from varied geographies and sites of cohabitation with avian life: tūi and piwakawaka singing in the artist’s mother’s backyard in Tāmaki Makaurau auckland; mynahs and crows croon from their grandmother’s balcony in Mumbai; the first nightingales of spring arrive beside their bedroom window in berlin; a cacophony of sparrows chirping enters the late greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy’s apartment in Alexandria. Each soundscape is layered with evocative field recordings in this collaboration with artist Tini Aliman, who engineered the recordings: the pedals of a jacquard loom at a silk weaver’s atelier in Kashan; bells tolling from the interior of a Zoroastrian fire temple in Mumbai; sounds from the non-EU immigration arrivals line at Berlin Brandenburg airport; water splashing against bodies and tiles inside a gay hammam in Istanbul.
તમે જે પણ કરો તે પ્રેમથી કરો
Whatever you do just do it with love
Granny
The act of writing spills into a range of possibilities: experiments with language all begin as failures that have thin culminations. Suspensions is an eleven-part language-based work consisting of autofictive fragments, poems, letters and essays that serve as microhistories loosely corresponding with the visual and sound-based components in How to puncture the sky and hear the stones sing. Eleven incomplete drafts are presented in A5 booklets along stone bases that invite the audience to participate as proof readers: to collect, explore and scrutinize the meandering plots, voices and temporalities charted by Areez Katki as they compose an experimental novel.
آیا زمین، که زیر پای تو میلرزد،
از تو تنهاتر نیست؟
Isn’t the earth, trembling under your feet
?lonelier than you are
Forough Farrokhzad
Areez Katki has been scribing and re-scribing a biomythography using various grounds—textiles, paper, earth, sound—by blending the fabular with the historic in varied registers that defy distinction. There are no clean beginnings nor endings to be encountered in the migrant story, but rather, learnings and unlearnings. By reflecting upon notions of embodied hybridity and the (extra)ordinary affects that traverse our oceans and skies, the artist’s role as a storyteller here attests to the plurality that emerges when there’s no ground upon which one may stand firm.