Artwork details: Ātash (Exceptionalist Tendencies) 2024. Cotton embroidery on remnant cloth, 76 x 51cm

Tim Melville is proud to present an exhibition of 13 embroidered images by Areez Katki, each of which is created over a cloth remnant collected during a collaborative research process with his grandfather’s tailor, ‘M’, in Tardeo, Mumbai.

The series of 13 works continues his enquiry around queer affects / emotional responses using lost and partially-recovered material drawn from the personal, the social and the literary. The artist asks us to sit with these stories as they spill beyond an individual lifespan, and to listen to forebears as we navigate the contemporary world.

In ‘Vazhghān | Vocabulary’ Katki employs acts of translation and co-authorship as methods for his storytelling. He describes his new work as not only “positing questions around hybrid solidarities, delanguaging, and aesthetic affinities held by queer bodies” but also as “an attempt to strengthen my understanding of Farsi, the language my late-grandmother Thrity communicated in.”

Opening night 6 November, 6pm