This series of nine diptych works on paper are based on a reframing of archaeological material from the vantage point of the Parsi queer diaspora. The process began with an exploration of archives—beginning from a broad range—that contained artifacts from Achaemenid Persia, particularly those which were excavated by European archaeological teams from the 19th and early-20th centuries. Most of these objects were taken to Europe and several are still at the Musée du Louvre in Paris; some are from the Oxus Treasure, which is a large finding of gold and precious metal-based Achaemenid findings, which are still at the British Museum; and a select few artifacts and architectural motifs cited in this series are from the National Museum of Iran (Tehran) and the present-day ruins of Persepolis (located in the Fars province of present-day Iran), which was destroyed by Alexander of Macedon in 330 BC.

Over the past seven years Katki has closely studied what remains of Achaemenid art: alongside these studies he has practiced the queer art of fabulation, through cues provided in elements of tangible narrative that are traceable in Zoroastrian decorative motifs, domestic and ceremonial artifacts, and the structural plans of Persepolis which has been repeatedly visited by him since his first field trip there in 2018.

This first diptych from the Pediment and Frieze series (2023) was composed on the basis of attempting to remember material loss and to layer it in sheer sheets of chroma. The larger top leaf of this diptych depicts an impressionistically rendered lion-headed rhyton from the Achaemenid treasury, which is currently held by the Louvre. A highly chromatic, almost naïve, treatment toward the anthropomorphised vessel’s form speaks of a childlike psychology that the artist’s hand often produces: citing a time when he first encountered the object, aged 10, during a trip to Paris with his family. The smaller lower leaf of this diptych is an abstracted motif based on traces of Elamite architecture—the ziggurat form—and a frieze of Elamite soldiers, which flanks the Northern Gate staircase at Persepolis. This posits how a fetishization of forms and cultural material often occurs when one dominant culture destroys and subsumes material from another: in this case it cites the destruction of the Elamite civilisation at the hands of the then newly-formed Achaemenian rulers of Persia in the 6th Century BC. The series opens by citing a cycle of patriarchal conquest—one rooted in consumption and domination—that has persisted across human history.