Exploring the tactile and sensuous nature of textiles has been a recurring focus in Katki’s practice over the past decade. As he gathers and repurposes old, found and sometimes remnants of newer textiles, we might see how each bolt of cloth holds close associations with material memory, sometimes familial and deeply personal; sometimes more political and historic threads emerge. Though as objects themselves, the use of textiles implies a complex set of politics: while on one hand they speak of industry, culture and the development of manmade crafts, on the other they are intimate substrates that our bodies collide, rub and coalesce with; sometimes textiles are gendered and have associations with domesticity and ritual. While holding all these politics together in his mind, Katki mines the personal and the historic when formulating his embroidered drawings, which puncture and suture alike these surfaces that we view so close to quotidian existences. The stories that we witness in his embroidery often break into abstraction: a style of proto-writing and non-linguistic communication that has become a hallmark of Katki’s visual language.

This panel is an abstraction based on the artist’s fascination with Achaemenid bas relief friezes of soldiers, dignitaries and courtiers at the Apadana Palace at Persepolis. Upon studying various sections of these archaeological sites, and the narratives that they often feature, one is plucked by Katki for the study of this work: four men frozen in dutiful, often stiff and schematically motionless statures with ornate headgear crowning them in a manner reminiscent of flowers. In an attempt to imagine the lives of these soldiers, when not in dutiful servitude to the empire—and at ease—he has suspended their bodily lines in queer fantasy. Katki began pulling apart some of the key compositional elements of this particular section of four soldiers in procession at Persepolis. But here they are reduced to a bare number of blue lines—pulled languidly apart and seemingly devoid of pictorial detail. Instead, the artist has further imagined them as a row of flowers, some of whom have been reduced to only stems—implying that they are relaxed, helmetless, at ease and coalescing in the relational sensuality of one another’s bodies.