Unkept, Chau Chak Wing Museum

Unkept: Kirtika Kain draws on Kain’s encounter with the Victoria & Albert Museum’s V & A East Storehouse, a space that sits between display and storage. During a research residency in East London, Kain was inspired by this model and adopts the Storehouse as a metaphor for a museum in transition: striving for transparency while grappling with the violence embedded within its own collections. 

Working with ancient, elemental materials such as copper, tar, hessian and beeswax, Kain considers the cultural loss and the overlooked contributions of marginalised communities. She creates an intermediary zone - open crates and objects suspended between order and disorder, preservation and corrosion - revealing how imagination itself can become a form of remembrance. 

Kain’s practice is grounded in her Dalit heritage and the history of anti-caste literature and song. Her studio operates as a site informed by history, yet open to imagining new possibilities. Through repetition and casting processes, Kain generates a fictional archive - one that exposes the aporia in the historical record and evokes the unarchivable legacies that resist containment.