Areez Katki اریز کاتکی (he/they) has a practice that dwells around language and material-based intersections. His work surveys queer spatiality and memory, often expressed through modes of biomythography and fabulation in installation-based presentations. Born in Mumbai (India) and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau auckland (Aotearoa new zealand), Katki’s frequent relocations between two distinct topographies raises questions around the lived experiences of hybridity.

Over the last decade Katki has regularly lived and worked from an ancestral apartment in Tardeo, located in South Mumbai, where the site is treated as a point of active engagement and investigation. The objective of these returns has been to observe, gather and critically engage with plurality from a split-perspective that is unique to the diasporic experience. Fragmentations of an identity (a Zoroastrian Parsi-Irani; a queer ‘maji’ priest; a child of migrants raised in Aotearoa nz), are navigated through affects that perpetually challenge the lexicons of communication and material culture encountered between spaces. Acts of suturing this identity are often executed through storied histories in an experimental writing practice; as well as embroidered drawings on found cloth—an inherited pedagogy and visual art practice that Katki has developed since childhood, in the company of beloved matriarchs.

Katki’s positionality as an artist and writer sits at a uniquely global angle: matters of postcoloniality, migratory condition and queerness emerge from this practice while he simultaneously communes with ancestral knowledge systems that are inherited and embodied.

Katki’s work has been presented across Oceania, Asia, north america and europe. It is held in numerous public and private collections. In 2022 Katki was invited to present a body of work for the 7th edition of Colomboscope, ‘Language is Migrant’ curated by Anushka Rajendran (Colombo, SL); and a survey of his practice was exhibited at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with Khadim Ali, in ‘There Is No Other Home But This’ curated by Zara Stanhope (Ngāmotu new plymouth, NZ). In 2023 Katki was the Sarjeant Gallery’s Tylee Cottage artist in residence (Whanganui, NZ). In 2024 Katki presented his second a solo exhibition in India, ‘As This Chin Melts on Your Knee’ at Tarq Gallery (Mumbai, IN); and was invited to present a significant new body of work, ‘The Rhapsode’s Tools Will Build the Rhapsode’s House’ in ‘Personal Structures: Beyond Boundaries’ during the 60th Biennale di Arte (venice, IT).