Areez Katki’s role as a storyteller is situated within material and language-based possibilities. For the past decade this position has allowed them to commune with ancestral knowledge systems, inherited and embodied. Their interdisciplinary practice surveys queer spatiality and memory through modes of archiving, which build upon biomythography and fabulation as key modes of storytelling.
The experimental language, sound and installation-based investigations in Katki's practice converge around a decade-long practice of hand-embroidering drawings on found cloth. As a formerly ordained Zoroastrian priest, Katki’s interests in an archive of esoteric ancient knowledge systems is rooted in theology, but it also expands into a critical questioning of hierarchies in contemporary practices, framed by ecological concerns and diasporic affects. Katki's positionality sits at a uniquely global angle: matters of mysticism, postcoloniality, migration and queerness emerge from a practice that posits questions around the nature of stories and how they evolve, mutate or influence the ways we coexist with material culture.
Their work has been exhibited across Asia, Oceania, North America and Europe, and 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 Tylee Cottage artist in residence (Whanganui, NZ), with an upcoming dome commission in the historic Sarjeant Gallery in 2026. In 2024 Katki presented his second solo exhibition in India, ‘As This Chin Melts on Your Knee’ at Tarq Gallery (Mumbai, IN). Katki was appointed the Aotearoa NZ visual artist in residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien for a twelve-month period over 2024–2025 (berlin, DE), which culminated in a solo presentation titled ‘How to puncture the sky and hear the stones sing’. In 2025 Katki developed a significant new spatial installation for TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol (Innsbruck, AT) for ‘Trilogie der Tochter Kapitel II: BINDUNG | The Daughters’ Trilogy Chapter II: COMMUNION’ curated by Nina Tabassomi.