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.

This third painting from the Anointed series revisits the sensorial and fleeting traces of a memory from Katki’s trip through Iran in 2018, on a day when he was driving north from the Greater Khorasan region toward the Caspian Sea. As the journey progressed and the landscape became significantly more verdant, Katki’s drawings and notes from the time testified also to the changing qualities of caustic light as they approached the north. One day they drove past a group of women near a village, harvesting scarce crops of purple saffron crocus flowers which had ceased blooming for the most part in late summer. This scarcity produced a pooling of purple amidst pale greens, yellow and reddish soil. This painting was made using two elements that coalesced to create a juxtaposition of watercolor against oil. Katki used his ittar roller of saffron oil to draw impressions against the plain leaf of cotton paper, which marked and stained it to the point of translucency: these impressions were then layered with washes of watery pigments of color that composed this portrait of a memory driving through an ancient saffron field in Iran, using both memory and oil to anoint a sensitive ecology that is now suspended in time.