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

In scorched I and scorched II, Kain transforms industrial and ritual materials – British gypsum, resin, bitumen, gold leaf, wax and charcoal – into dark, stratified terrains that evoke earth charred under extreme heat. Each work begins from a silicon impression of another, repeating acts of self-citation and imprint, as if memory itself were being cast, burned and re-formed. Through these alchemical processes, Kain reclaims materials historically tied to labour, value and hierarchy, recasting them as sites of embodied knowledge and resistance.