Tim Melville is proud to present an exhibition of 13 artworks whose embroidered imagery has been created over cloth remnants collected during a collaborative research process with the artist’s grandfather’s tailor, ‘M’, in Tardeo, Mumbai.
The ‘Vazhghān | Vocabulary’ series continues Katki’s ongoing enquiry around queer affects / emotional responses through the use of lost and partially-recovered material drawn from the personal, the social and the literary.
The artist asks us to sit with these stories as they spill beyond an individual lifespan and asks us, further, to listen to forebears as we navigate the contemporary world.
In ‘Vazhghān | Vocabulary’ Katki employs acts of translation and co-authorship as methods for his rich storytelling.
They are, he says, “abstracted fabulations, blending worlds of childhood memory with mythic ruptures in time, and invoked by a sensual phrasing encountered during readings of Forough Farrokhzad’s poetry.”
Katki describes his new works as “positing questions around hybrid solidarities, delanguaging, and aesthetic affinities held by queer bodies” as well as “an attempt to strengthen my understanding of Farsi, the language my late-grandmother Thrity communicated in.”
Areez Katki was born in Mumbai, India in 1989. He came to Aotearoa New Zealand as a child and grew up in East Auckland.
His multidisciplinary practice explores his genetic heritage and landscape through embroidery, tapestry, weaving, beading, painting, printmaking and sculpture. He is the recipient of the 2024 Berlin Residency awarded by Creative New Zealand.
