Kirtika Kain | Sensing into the Abyss

Kirtika Kain’s work is a radical adventure in Dalit abstraction, where ancient and organic materials become tools of resistance. Her paintings and sculptures defy conventional narratives, using illegibility and visceral texture to challenge casteism, colonialism, and patriarchy—offering a sensory, transgressive commentary on the Dalit feminine.

Upon entering Kirtika Kain’s studio, I am immediately struck by the force with which her canvases command my attention. The only way I can describe her painting is volcanic: a rupture in the hegemony of the contemporary art world. Kirtika is attuned to the interiority of her materials—tar, copper, vermilion, gold leaf, earthen pigment, cow dung—full of vitality and agency, and she follows their “unrest” with a reverential attendance. Akin to magma releases and lava flows, her works offer a glimpse into the depths of the Dalit feminist consciousness. The choice of her materials are both aesthetic and political as they resist the discriminatory Brahminical ideas of teethu or ritual impurity. As a painter, she embodies a volcanic vent, and the materials erupt through her onto the canvas.

Much has been written about the ways to mobilise around Babasaheb Ambedkar’s call to Educate, Agitate, Organise. Shared understandings of how Dalit literature, storytelling, figurative paintings, photography, sculpture, music, and socially engaged projects contribute to rich histories of Dalit poetics have developed. But not enough has been written about the potential of Dalit abstraction as a subversive tool for agitation: the fundamental premise of Kirtika’s paintings. Amongst a handful of Dalit contemporary artists globally exploring the potential of Dalit abstraction, like Amol K. Patil, Prabhakar Kamble, and Sajan Mani; Kirtika charts her own path in the search for an aesthetics of ungoverning. It is palpable that she is less concerned with what Dalit abstraction is and instead occupies herself with the question of what Dalit abstraction can do. Amidst the myriad tactics exercised to systematically erase Dalit identities, one of the most insidious is the imposition of forced illiteracy. Kirtika reclaims autonomy inherent in illegibility, radically reversing its effect onto the viewer. Her work resists the possibility of further aesthetic violence being inflicted upon her community.

Working at Parramatta Artist Studios where Kirtika is an artist, I am privileged to witness the inextricable pleasure she derives from her creative process. Kirtika is a compulsive improviser, and that spontaneity is reflected in her paintings. In tending to archival absences, she indulges the adventure of her imagination, revelling in the density of rage and sensuality, love and defiance, grief and hope, and transforming the abjectification of Dalit women into dynamic, layered subjectivities. As she poignantly remarks, “I’m filling the void in the archives by sensing into the abyss.” You hear ancestral screams and echoes, you see the cracked earth, the blazing sun and the flowing streams, and you sense the suffocation of toil so profusely, you feel the need to come up for air.

Tar is the real protagonist in her latest body of work. The viscosity of tar evokes many things—matted locks, dark skin, manual labour, superstition. The new work for the upcoming exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, will feature a hessian soft sculpture bathed in tar, upon which Kirtika employs a process of silicon impressions taken from the accompanying works in the show. Comprising a series of interconnected paintings on canvas, including vibrant copper hues that shift from bright pinks to deep blues, this collection showcases Kirtika’s ability to blend personal and collective histories. Through applying silicon impressions of the existing works onto the hessian, a technique from her formal printmaking roots, she embarks on a revelatory process—of appropriation, of mutation, of juxtaposition, of contradiction, of recursive-citation—to re-vision the Dalit feminine from a new, boundless perspective. Each impression is unique and comes alive through Kirtika’s mechanical and labour-intensive process. She is honouring traditional knowledge systems—intuitive, oral, somatic, experiential—that have been held by Dalit women, marginalised by the triple forces of casteism, colonialism, and the patriarchy, and she demands we collectively grieve what we’ve lost.

Visitors may find themselves circumambulating this soft sculpture, drawn in by her depth and dimensions. Coming from a people oppressed by the oldest system of human hierarchy, Kirtika refuses to partake in any representational frame. Instead, in a visceral sense, her paintings “un-forgive.” Not to be mistaken with an instinct “to punish,” rather as a radical counter to religious, particularly Vedic notions of sin, sacrifice, forgiveness, and repentance. They challenge wilful ignorance, inviting viewers to reconsider their relationship with any system of social stratification.

As a Bahujan woman, I take the invitation to write about Kirtika’s work seriously. In an Australian diaspora context, which often insists that casteism exists elsewhere (in the past, on the subcontinent), Kirtika effaces that myth by illuminating the present continuous tense of its fault lines. She, however, only draws our attention to this with the unwavering will to destroy it. Painting for Kirtika is an emancipatory pursuit, and she shoulders an immense responsibility. The rousing charge of her canvas remains with you long afterwards.

Exhibition
Mimetic Mass
7 March – 5 April 2025
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

This profile was published in Artist Profile, Issue 70, 2025.  
Images courtesy of the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney and Parramatta Art Studios, Granville.