Tell me the story
Of all the things.
Beginning wherever you wish, tell even us
– Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
In the attempt to raise questions about narrative – Areez Katki’s preferred medium – a clear concern emerges: to question the effectiveness of a single voice anew. It is the voice of a main character who carries within her a whole sea of ancestral voices. Sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant – the polyphony that springs from this flowing archive can sing and soothe. It allows the character to grow and sometimes even reveal itself as a fully formed character, but these voices can also contradict, hurt, disturb or turn violently against the narrator. This form of a narrative process of confrontation can be understood as a central motif in Katki’s multidisciplinary practice.
How to puncture the sky and hear the stones sing is the first chapter in a three-part exhibition series. This first stage is structured like a multi-layered, atmospheric experience: Top/Center/Bottom. Areez Katki’s artist’s novel is presented here at Künstlerhaus Bethanien as an experiment, in the form of a prologue of works that manifest themselves in space, sound and text. The works reflect the micro-stories, fragments and poetic traces from which Areez Katki has been developing an experimental novel project for 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 –
Areez Katki’s apartment in Mumbai is an archive of disparate narrative strands spanning four generations on the matrilineal side of the family. The current occupant sits uneasily in her grandmother’s armchair, chain-smoking. Memories pour fragmentarily into spatial encounters. Found and preserved textiles are revitalized by meditative hand embroidery created directly in the apartment. The textiles float in space as sculptural gestures – they capture the artist’s handiwork and at the same time elude linear access to time.
The embroidered works contain drawings, fragmentary notes and questions about the many voices that make their way through a web of quotations. Abstract diagrams referencing an ancient Avestan proverb float alongside fabulous portraits of elemental deities from the Zoroastrian pantheon; a Disney witch, who once triggered a fear of the color purple in Areez Katki, is embedded in mythical retellings from Ferdowsi’s epic poetry. Autofictive micro-stories transcend the figurative and lead to the abstract. Micro-stories transcend the figurative and lead to the abstract. Inspired by Areez Katki’s mother’s work as a stenographer, a shorthand is invented and embroidered in fabric. Areez Katki’s visual language condenses narratives that are imbued with an ethic of love. In them, languages and identities are set in motion – interwoven into flowing forms of queer physicality. Like the thoughts of a restless mind, like memories of a complex past, these works hang in the space in subtle disorder – floating, vulnerable and open to close observation.
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
Katki’s grandmother, Thrity Lakdawala, fed birds every morning at sunrise – no matter where she was geographically, in SWANA, India and Oceania. Thrity awoke with the dawn and performed the ritual of bird feeding, which allowed her to connect with higher beings. Today, Areez Katki refers to this ritual as inheritance. The new work entitled Disjecta Membra: Series D, a two-channel installation, comprises four soundscapes that gently spread out between folds of fabric in the exhibition space. Each soundtrack feeds on field recordings – captured at dawn in different places where people and birds coexist: tūi and piwakawaka sing in Areez Katki’s mother’s garden in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland); mynahs and crows sound from her grandmother’s balcony in Mumbai; the first nightingales of spring approach the bedroom window in Berlin; a cacophony of sparrows permeates the apartment of the late Greek poet Konstantinos P. Kaváfis in Alexandria. In close collaboration with artist Tini Aliman, responsible for the sound engineering, each soundtrack is overlaid with haunting recordings: the pedal of a Jacquard loom in a silk weaver’s studio in Kashan; bell sounds from inside a Zoroastrian fire temple in Mumbai; sounds from the non-EU immigration queue at Berlin Brandenburg Airport; water splashing against bodies and tiles in a queer hammam in Istanbul.
તમે જે પણ કરો તે પ્રેમથી કરો
Whatever you do just do it with love
– Grandmother
Writing itself extends in many directions: Every attempt to experiment with language begins as a failure, with only tenuous outcomes. Suspensions is an eleven-part text-based work consisting of autofictional fragments, poems, letters and essays – micro-stories that are loosely connected to the visual and sonic works in the exhibition. The eleven unfinished drafts appear in A5 booklets on stone plinths – the audience is invited to view them like editors, collecting, permeating and exploring the intertwined narrative strands, voices and temporalities that Areez Katki is mapping on the way to 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 –
On various media – textiles, paper, earth, sound – Areez Katki writes and reworks a biomythography in which the fabulous and the historical are interwoven into forms of expression that defy clear categorization. Migrant narratives have no clear beginnings or endings – rather, they are characterized by learning and unlearning processes. Reflecting on concepts of embodied hybridity and (extra)ordinary affects that are carried with currents and winds across continents, Areez Katki’s narrative voice finds the polyphony that emerges when there is no solid ground to stand on.
