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I currently sit in Exarcheia – a politically disputed and vibrant quarter of Athens – straddling ancient, modern and new worlds of art, text, politics and materiality.

The residency at Phoenix Athens officially began in June 2019 and will be a two-month-long research, exploration and fabrication period that concludes with a show and artist talk. My aim for the European summer was to delve into queer poetics, Ottoman-influenced materiality and visual inducements from the ancient world that address conversations around healing past traumas – and to see how these might manifest themselves in a new body of work.

Initially I was drawn to sociological identity theory, namely from a selection of essays titled Mirrors and Masks (1969) by Anselm L Strauss, who looks at performativity juxtaposed with the fateful appraisals made of oneself by oneself, particularly in relation to sexual identity. Jonathan Lauritsen’s A Freethinker’s Primer of Male Love (1998) has also been an insightful – while idealistic – text that delves into the history of homosexual love, persecutions and

Traversing forth and uncruisingFollowing his highly personal first solo exhibition Bildungsroman, currently touring Aotearoa, Areez Katki asked, “Where to next?”

In Greece for a new residency, the textile artist describes the inward healing and outward research he’s been pursuing.

queer performativity across various cultures, creeds and civilisations. These include the cultural practices in the Pacific, Persia and of course Ancient Greece.

Once I had achieved a certain level of understanding of and response to these texts, I went out and ceased theorising altogether. I engaged with my subjects: men.

Not just any men, or any kind of men – but rather individuals with whom I could share stories around queer trauma and the idea of empowered vulnerability, attempting to address the Eurocentric queer gaze and to locate constructive rhetoric that dealt with healing rather than othering. They were found with little effort – only some assistance from social media apps (yes, Grindr was employed ever so briefly), Athenian gallery openings or on the streets of Exarcheia. Three men in particular made themselves available as so-called ‘subjects’ for my new work. Each has become a close friend with whom I can explore the depths of homointimacy. Consensually, I have gleaned from the textual and responsive material of these relationships, documenting fleeting pleasures from the minutiae of our lives. I drew on this material for Uncruising, my solo exhibition in Athens that opened on 9 July 2019.

While I had gone out deliberately to find ‘subjects’ for my project, dating these men (who shall remain unnamed) had not been an intentional part of the research. This happened along the way, as a social pursuit for recreational fun in Athens – but it soon became a compelling part of my narrative. The research and the personal began to overlap, requiring me to find the term ‘uncruising’ that linguistically challenges the common conflation of lasciviousness with queer culture.

That conflation works as a pressure, often obligatory, on queer performance. The often vapid, ephemeral relations we have with various people may be seen as examples of harmful and anthropologically dismissive behaviour. This can be a source of trauma among homosexual men, leading to indifference, disconnect, racial prejudices, body shaming and apathy. To combat this, I approached my subjects – perhaps not intentionally at first – with a clear repudiation of those values and mannerisms.

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I soon became mindful of the effects certain gestures and words have on us, some of which may disarm and perhaps even heal. These layers of insecurity and trauma have been touched upon by Dr Alan Downs in The Velvet Rage (2015); in unpacking them, I attempted to address issues around queer performativity by reaching a point of trust that decorated my construct of homointimacy. The aim was to find that tender place where treasures dwell and from where they may be extracted – or rather documented – before my time with the ‘subjects’ evaporated.

The work in Uncruising feels less like my work of previous years. Firstly, it is being fabricated on site, in my studio and flat, in a city that I’ve only just started to understand. The layers of history in Greece cannot be decoded or understood through any one discipline, whether one employs an understanding of language, classical history, archeology or ancient philosophy – not even perhaps through a synthesis that encompasses them all. But to contextualise what I have already learned and can comprehend, Greek poetics and homoerotic art have been the most accessible points of reference. One might expect to see more homoerotic depictions on Greek ceramics in museums in Athens; however, due to censorship and the mysterious ‘disappearance’ of many overtly homoerotic artefacts, this has sadly not been a prominent (or even easily addressed) part of Greek heritage in the public arena.

All artworks by Areez Katki; photos courtesy of the artist

Opposite: Good at Savouring Coffee, 2019, cotton and silk thread hand-embroidery on repurposed linen handkerchief

Above: Lovefool, 2019 (detail), cotton thread hand-embroidery on antique handloomed Cretan linen, assemblage on dowel Below: White Men on Brown Ground (i–x) (detail of number ix), 2019, mixed media on packaging paper

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Then there’s the political and economic unrest, which has increased tension around conflicting ideologies – an area I feel less confident about addressing in my work, especially being an outsider from New Zealand. However, the subject of displacement has been explored to some degree in Uncruising, and I have used my own non-European male form to address decolonisation.

Secondly, a significant point of distinction between this and previous works is that the practices I’ve grown accustomed to as a textile artist – sourcing fibres, rendering, tapestry-weaving and embroidering – have been somewhat interrupted. There have been several distractions, creating a rift in the textile-rich domestic realm I’ve grown accustomed to. This gives me pause. However, this challenge has also had an interesting side effect. I have had to lean on new media and modes of communication, and therefore gained an ability to speak to personal narratives in ways that cannot always be demonstrated through textiles.

I’ve also looked at materiality with more tenderness and sympathy than in most of my previous works (though not all, considering the various repurposed heritage cloth fragments in Bildungsroman). I’ve grown contemporaneously accustomed to Athenian landscapes, customs, mannerisms, colours, textures and ephemera. They have provided me with materials to use and a subject to address, playing a large part in how the work was conceived and conducted. In previous endeavours, I privileged densely hand-embroidered surfaces, juxtaposing them with clear reference to preexisting textile tropes; but I am now more comfortable with the idea of exhibiting a range of multidisciplinary works. The processes

of rendering, gleaning and photographic documentation have become just as important as the processes of weaving and embroidering. The works presented in this exhibition, therefore, will manifest in the form of textiles but also as suites of drawings, watercolour paintings and photographs, which once would have supplemented the embroidery but today sit beside them with an equal degree of significance. I found this to be the best method for demonstrating temporal pleasures – fleeting but retained by the hand and one’s memory. The works thus gently unravel the notion of meaningless sexual encounters, instead seeking to nourish and to share those aforementioned treasures.

In terms of material research, I’ve looked to sources of bridal textiles dispersed between Athens and Asia Minor. After revisiting the Izmir Ethnography Museum in Turkey, I juxtaposed certain specimens there with works in the Benaki Foundation’s main museum collection in Athens. It was here that I began drawing links between Ottoman needlework practices and how they’ve influenced later Cypriot, Cretan and Epirotian needlework techniques – some of which I have examined closely and learned to use for my own work, helping to preserve craft heritage techniques that have diminished since the late 19th century. I met with Xenia Politou, a curator at the Benaki Museum, and delved into the museum’s extensive compendium of textiles preserved and archived since the 1960s. Two particularly arresting examples of Greek heritage embroidery included a bridal mantle and linen chemise embroidered by the bride herself, from the Dodecanese; and a sampler from the Epirote region featuring work by an (unknown) apprentice who was both

Alexander Iolas’s abandoned estate, Athens

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learning embroidery and studying zoology, and who decided to transcribe these two varying processes of education on one very didactic and charming surface. These pieces further contextualised my research around the narrative modes I found most compelling.

With this engagement with craft-driven ideology and material sources within a Greek context, the Benaki Foundation’s main museum and their workshop, the Mentis Passementerie, provided me with a technical framework and tools to create a suite of my own textiles. Upon these, I superimposed didactic narratives around homointimacy. The works have been nourished further by Greek poetics – from Sappho’s Lesbos fragments to Constantine P Cavafy’s early-20th-century exploration of the queer gaze. Another enigmatic figure I discovered in my reading was an erudite Alexandrian Greek figure named Alexander Iolas (1907–87), a prolific collector and art dealer – and a close friend of his fellow Alexandrian, Cavafy – whose house in the suburbs of Athens I visited.

Once housed on his estate, Iolas’s collection of surrealist, dada and cubist works has today been dispersed across Europe, while his villa has been neglected for more than 30 years – resulting in urban decay on an almost idyllic level of desolation. Iolas’ home serves as a poignant physical monument to society’s treatment of homosexual figures and their forgotten legacies.

As my lover and I strolled through the ruins of this estate whilst reading poems by Cavafy and contemplating the lives he and Iolas must have had in spaces like these, we encountered a dilapidated folly of Doric columns that

Above: Alexander Iolas Suite – iii: Memory (MNHMH), 2019, watercolour and lily pollen pigment on cold-pressed cotton paper Below right: Fragment Garden, 2019, Czech glass bead tapestry panels woven with cotton thread

had been crudely spraypainted with phalluses, and a found a fragment of stone with one word etched on it: ‘MNHMH’ – ‘memory’, in Modern Greek. Through all these experiences, excavations and intertextual material – in a space where ancient, modernist and contemporary delights are preserved and may be contemplated – I derived the concept of uncruising.

Above all, I hope that this concept comes alive for others in the visually arresting assortment of media I am seeking to create. If so, Uncruising will serve as another project in my career that may incite thoughtful discourse around the ways we look at queer identities, histories and healing the bodies that lie beside us today.