KIRTIKA KAIN

As a member of the Dalit diaspora, Kain is concerned by the absence of Dalit cultural life in museums and formal archives. For her, ancient materials such as tar, copper and gold serve as sites of history and memory. Eschewing a singular Dalit aesthetic, she explores the role abstraction can play in essaying the unspoken histories of these communities.

Mimetics is a series of works in tar and gold leaf, created in London and exhibited at the recently concluded Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Her intuitive approach to each of these ancient materials gestures at rich, multiplicitous Dalit histories that are undocumented but have been passed on, at least partially, through memory, embodiment, and a relationship with the earth.

Mimetics extend a practice centred on peeling, layering, and casting surfaces using materials such as gold, hessian, tar, and pigments. Within the studio, this process becomes a means of generating an archive where none exists. Although the surfaces and methods repeat, each material transforms through the process, accumulating its own traces, histories, and evolving characteristics. The works gesture toward histories that persist through embodied knowledge and connection to land, while marking the absences that continue to shape archival records.