Kirtika Kain is an artist practicing on Darug Country, NSW Australia. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2016 and was awarded the Bird Holcomb Scholarship to complete her Master in Fine Art in 2018 at National Art School, Sydney. She was a recipient of the Lloyd Rees Memorial Youth Art Award in 2017, the Art Incubator Grant and Dyason Bequest, Art Gallery of New South Wales, and a finalist in the Churchill Fellowship and numerous art prizes including Blacktown Art Prize (2017, 2019). Kirtika has been a finalist in the Create NSW Emerging Artist Fellowship at Artspace, a recipient of the Parramatta Artist Studio (2020, 2024) and an artist in residence at the British School at Rome (2019) and the Amant Siena Summer Residency (2022). Kirtika has recently exhibited in the projects Wake Up Call for my Ancestors, Oyoun, Berlin (2022) and Plea to the Foreigner, African Biennale of Photography, Mali, (2022) collaborating with Dalit artists and thinkers within India and the diaspora. She has recently shown a solo exhibition of works titled Blue Bloods at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery (2023) and will be exhibiting a new commission for the 24th Biennale of Sydney in 2024.
Kirtika Kain (b.1990) examines caste and identity through her powerful works of art. This exploration of caste through her artwork speaks to her experiences with caste as a woman raised in Sydney, Australia. Though raised physically outside the Indian caste system, her art practice connects her Dalit body to an ancient Dalit presence through materials like cow dung, sindoor, human hair, charcoal, gold and tar, reclaiming their traditional religiosity as her own. The quality of silence and sacredness that these materials uphold are central in her work.
Through conversation with her family and reading the words of Dr B R Ambedkar and Dalit literature extensively, Kain brings together inherited personal and collective memories in her work. She is also inspired by the current generation of Dalit writers and thinkers within India and the diaspora. Kain’s visual representations through materials tell a story of these personal and collective histories that navigate social contexts. Brought to light by her aesthetic vision, the viscerality and rawness of the material is Kain’s work in its purest form. Her work attempts to speak to these inherited narratives yet does not seek to become a representation of a singular Dalit experience.
Kain’s work reflects this inheritance and safeguards these personal and collective memories. The materials she uses are recreated and reformed from their traditional associations into aesthetic objects which pay heed to Dalit visuality and identity. The materiality of Kain’s artworks invokes a timelessness; the narratives her canvases explore are manifestations of a past long gone. It should be noted that Kain’s art is also shaped by sacred texts like the Manusmriti, a text that speaks to the origins of the caste system. Kain’s interest in the Manusmriti is in its descriptions of the role of women in ancient Indian society.
The temporality of Kain’s work mirrors an archive; it seeks to correct a historical record that has marginalised Dalits for centuries, and instead tells stories of Dalit history and present times. The material nature of the work brings new meaning and a new material iconography to Indian contemporary art. Kain’s archive, constantly evolving and being created, reclaims spaces in which Dalits have been historically denied access. She is especially interested in telling the stories of caste in the diaspora, and is influenced by female voices. The materials speak to her, drawing her female Dalit body to an ancient past that embodies the rawness of these materials. Her sensorial work haunts and stuns viewers alike, their material presence echoing silence in the spaces they occupy.
- Anisha Palat, PhD candidate in History of Art, University of Edinburgh