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.

While studying an improvisational piece of tanbur instrumental music by Seyed Khalil Alinezhad, Katki located a moment in the score that felt like forty seconds of another piece previously heard from the same musician’s lyrical lexicon. The term intermezzo—a brief interval between a score that departs from its dominant themes—is conjured and illustrated in this abstract composition, where Katki cross-references sensorial cues using his synesthetic abilities that allow him to transfer sound into color and form. This is a brief portrait of time, enjoyed in the company of a fleeting moment within a musical piece, where it begins to reveal something that it never intended to say in its dominant body of work. Time—fractured and queer—often features in Katki’s work as a speculative tool, or a concept that he synthesizes into questions about our relationships with materials and their affective qualities.