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.

Unlike various other diptych works in this series, Capital & Base deals not with material culture from the looted or vandalized past, but rather a phenomenology of Persian culture that has endured through a vast temporal passage. While the larger lower leaf of this diptych depicts a capital from one of the gargantuan columns that held up roofs at Persepolis, the artist has also cited 20th century carbon-dated studies that suggest the luster of variegated pigments that once glazed the masonry across the citadel’s Achaemenid architecture: lapis lazuli, carnelian red and turquoise. This portrait of a column’s capital obfuscates its grand objecthood and replaces its dimensional qualities for a more playful flattening that verges into color field painting, where chroma bleeds into chroma, by way of his watery fracture across cotton paper. The smaller top part of the diptych is a schematised and abstracted vegetal motif of lotus buds from a carved column base that once held its counterpart. The artist’s choice to subvert orders (a base traditionally being at the bottom and a capital at the top) speaks of an intention to eschew and subvert gravitational linearity for a queerer compositional formalism—based more on an aesthetic, almost fetishistic rendering of architecture instead of leaning toward perspectival or historio-cultural accuracies.