While reflecting on the relational and affective qualities conjured by organic materials—the histories they hold, the traces they leave in the bodily archive—Katki decided to explore some of these materials and process them as pigments for a series of paintings. The term ‘anointing’ or ‘to anoint’ have very obvious spiritual associations, while also holding deeply corporeal qualities where a liquid, particularly oil, is used for many religious ceremonies (particularly in Zoroastrianism but also within the Judeo-Christian canon) to mark and sanctify a body for ceremonial purposes.

Katki has borrowed this verb from a religious lexicon, but also removed it from the auspices of spiritual or religio-cultural specificity. The act of anointing, here, acts more in reference to his own personal relationship with queer ecologies: materials that he has historic and personal affinities for, materials that conjure sensorial meanderings, and thus, materials which also speak of his own corporeality. By extension of this relational study, four meaningful substances that he found himself able to trace, stain and mark surfaces of his body with, and subsequently these four sheets of cotton paper with, were chosen for this series.

When Katki was on his journey across Iran in 2018, he left room for spontaneous diversions, meanderings and excursions—particularly toward the end when he found himself driving around the North-East regions of Khorasan, parts of which bordered Afghanistan. In a small town named Torbat-e-Jam he encountered an antique dealer who sold various artifacts and found a shelf of semiprecious stones which were traditionally ground and used as pigments for painting. Aware of its art historic weight, Katki purchased a lump of lapis lazuli sourced from mines across the Afghani border. Six years later, he decided to finally begin using the lapis pigment: after studying its veins and qualities, he began grinding some bits repeatedly, as finely as possible, and suspended a portion in Arabic gum. These now feature in this sensorial rendering of the Ishtar Gate, which Katki had more recently visited at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. The gate, once located in the lower Euphrates in present-day Iraq, had all its finest lapis lazuli-glazed tiles excavated and stolen by teams of German archaeologists in fragments over the course of 1904 – 1914. This painting looks toward illuminating the phenomenology of displaced materials and archaeological practices that allow only stains, traces and memories of an Indigenous culture to exist in the memory of those who have more direct connections with the land and culture from where those materials were sourced. Both, Katki’s body and the lapis lazuli that he painted this impression of a section of the Ishtar Gate with, are impressions of displacement.