Areez Katki and Khadim Ali: There is no other home but this

Surveying the practice of Areez Katki and Khadim Ali There is no other home but this continues the Govett-Brewster’s focus on art that embraces and explores ideas of home, family and ancestral lands and beliefs.

Living in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia respectively, Areez Katki and Khadim Ali are artists with ancestry to the Persian Empire (559 BCE–331 BCE), a region spanning modern Iran, Egypt, Turkey and parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Both artists share a collective past, having grown up with Persian literature, language (Farsi) and, for Areez, ordination into the indigenous Zoroastrian faith. Their works are informed by this shared heritage, along with their personal experience.

Areez’s practice is redolent with his life’s emotional journey, from the Parsi family’s emigration to India to avoid persecution and his diasporic life between Aotearoa New Zealand and the family home in Mumbai, to his admiration for the embroidery that was a highly regarded art form in Persia. His new work in the exhibition is a tribute to the matriarchal figures who taught him needlework traditions as much as it is an exploration of diasporic ways of being and queering epistemologies.

As a Hazara man whose homeland is Afghanistan’s Bamiyan central highlands, Khadim shares with Areez the origin stories of the mythical history of Persia such as in Hakīm Abul-Qāsim Firdawsī Tūsī (Ferdosi)’s Shahnama (c. 977–1010 CE) and Attar’s 12th-century poem “The Conference of the Birds.” Khadim’s experience of the beauty yet demonization of Hazara across centuries, and the interconnections between historical and contemporary conditions in Afghanistan, are expressed in miniature painting techniques learnt in Pakistan and Iran, and room-scale textiles and “war rugs” made in collaboration with makers in Afghanistan—women and men who bring traditional carpet weaving and embroidery work to his contemporary expressions of the demons and angels of conflict. Based on the synthesis of imagery in war rugs, his first ever animation conflates destruction in Bamiyan with the traumatic 2021 evacuation of Kabul.

There is no other home but this is a celebration of personal and cultural narratives, within which is contained critique of the violence of ethnic, patriarchal and colonial oppression in the artists’ homelands that has operated across millennia and continues around the world today. The work in the exhibition is an invitation from two artists to encourage a communality in histories, cultures and lives that are not ours.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with contributions by Areez Katki, Khadim Ali, Asad Buda, Atika Hussain, Elle Louie August,  Michael Young and Zara Stanhope and will be available 2 May 2022 from the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.

Areez Katki was born in 1989 in Mumbai, India, and lives and works in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa.

Khadim Ali was born in 1978 in Quetta, Pakistan, and lives and works in Sydney, Australia.