Kirtika Kain brings together material intensity, darkness and luminosity to consider caste, ancestral memory, labour and the charged politics of surface.
Kirtika Kain’s Midnight 2025 is a major work that extends the artist’s investigation into material histories, ancestral memory and the politics of caste. The work was made by taking silicone moulds from paintings in Kain’s studio and recasting their surfaces in tar and hessian, producing a vast, dark field assembled from repeated fragments. Flecked with gold and blue pigment, a colour of deep significance for Dalit communities, Midnight holds a powerful tension between weight and expansiveness, density and light. For Kain, materials are witnesses to histories that have not always been recorded. Here, surface becomes an archive: a place where memory, inheritance and resistance gather.
“Abstraction is a container for the contradictory, the unspoken, the human and the political. My reference points are as historical as caste itself; they are embedded in the earth and the stars. Materials are witnesses to history, and when it has not been recorded, we can use them to remember.”
Kirtika Kain
About the Artist
Kirtika Kain is an artist and educator born in New Delhi and based in Sydney. Her practice spans sculpture, experimental printmaking, and painting, drawing on her Dalit lineage to investigate ancestral memory, anti-caste thought, material histories, and the politics of diaspora.
Presented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
About Installations
Installations presents ambitious contemporary art throughout Carriageworks, and for the first time, extends into the city. The program of 14 projects features sculpture, textiles, painting, photography, kinetic forms, and public interventions, with works that are generous and immediate but also ask us to look more closely at the social, ecological, and cultural systems shaping our world.
Artists use spectacle, material invention and public address to explore some of the defining questions of contemporary life: how histories inhabit place, how images circulate, how materials carry memory, and how audiences gather, move, participate and reflect. Installations is curated by José Da Silva, Director of UNSW Galleries.
