Areez Katki (he/they) is an artist and writer whose practice dwells around conceptual and material-based intersections which survey the phenomenology of postcolonial identities. Born in Mumbai (India) and raised in Auckland (Aotearoa New Zealand), Katki’s frequent relocations between two distinct landscapes immersively pose questions around the lived experiences of hybridity.
Over the past eight years Katki has intermittently returned to live and work from an ancestral apartment in Tardeo, Mumbai—with the objectives to learn, observe and critically engage with plurality. This fragmentation of a complex diasporic identity is navigated with an unsteady footing; it is sometimes transgressed along with the perpetually shifting lexicon of material culture that Katki encounters between spaces. These relational embodiments and correspondences with materiality are underpinned in Sara Ahmed’s statement that, “Objects extend bodies, certainly, but they also seem to measure the competence of bodies and their capacity to ‘find their way’.” (‘The Orient and Other Others’ Queer Phenomenology 2006).
While investigative acts of gathering, embroidering and examining languages run throughout Katki’s nearly decade-long art practice, his writing contextualizes these ongoing engagements through experimental poetry and biomythography. Both disciplines sit in parallel, abstracting the historic and the personal, with gestures that retain one’s relational sensitivity with sites and embodiments.
Katki's work has been presented across Oceania, Asia, North America and Europe. It is held in numerous public and private collections internationally. 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); 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 (New Plymouth, NZ). Katki was the Sarjeant Gallery’s Tylee Cottage artist in residence for a five-month period in 2023 (Whanganui, NZ). In 2024 Katki was invited to present a significant new body of work in ‘Personal Structures: Beyond Boundaries’ at the 60th Biennale di Arte (Venice, IT). Katki was recently appointed the Aotearoa NZ visual artist in residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien for a twelve-month period over 2024–2025 (Berlin, DE).