"Contour (hirsute): A brief affective meditation on the ways in which the body is perceived by a person who doesn’t entirely ‘fit’ regulations or conventions proffered by western/eurocentric standards of beauty. Hair as being one of the outlines (or contour points) that punctuated a place from which Arash felt othered — but later in their life, empowered — by.”
(Arash is an autofictive protagonist in the artist's ongoing experimental novel)

Areez Katki’s role as a storyteller is situated around material and language-based possibilities. For the past decade this position has enabled them to commune with ancestral knowledge systems, inherited and embodied. Their interdisciplinary practice surveys hybrid spatialities and memory through writing, drawing and archiving, which build upon biomythography and fabulation as key modes of understanding. The experimental language, sound and installation-based investigations in Katki’s work converge around a lifelong practice of hand-embroidering on found cloth. Katki’s interest in ancient knowledge systems is rooted in Zoroastrian theology, which they formerly studied as a Nāvar-Martab (priest) in their community. These learnings have extended toward reservoirs of matrilineal knowledge and queer resistance. Katki's work has been presented across Oceania, Asia, North America, and Europe. In 2025 they completed a year-long artist residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, which culminated in a solo exhibition, ‘How to puncture the sky and hear the stones sing’, which ran parallel to an experimental novel Katki has been working on for the past six years.

Courtesy Tim Melville