Artist Interview: Conversation with Kirtika Kain

Kirtika Kain was born in New Delhi, India and now lives and works on Darug Country, Western Sydney. Considerations of caste and identity underpin her materially driven practice, which seeks to reimagine personal and collective narratives.

This email exchange between Kirtika Kain and Michael Moran, MAMA Head of Curatorial and Collections, occurred in May 2026.

First, I’d like to say that it is a special opportunity to have this discussion after some time has passed from the project launch. It gives us time to reflect on the work and for you, on what has brought your practice to this point. I know that since this project launched, and following a succession of recent major projects – a presentation for Chau Chak Wing at University of Sydney, the Adelaide Biennial, and of course the Kochi Biennale – you’ve spent some time in central India, connecting with other artists, and also making ancestral and cultural connections.

You’ve spoken previously of the cultural underpinning of your practice being something that typically resides in the studio, and is by nature personal. That the material manifestation of your studio reflection is what is then up for consideration in a public space. I get a sense from you that this delineation between what remains private and “in the studio” and what is held and reflected in the work is starting to become more porous. That the personal and cultural underpinnings of your work are moving more prominently into the space where the artwork is in dialogue with the world. Is that perception accurate, and if so, is it something that you’re open to discussing?

I don’t think the cultural underpinnings of my work have ever been private. I have been deliberate in ensuring I articulate the relationship of the work to my caste and caste identity. I was born in Delhi in the Chamar community, a Dalit community from North India. I am connected to the Ravidassia community who follow the teaching of the fifteenth-century saint Guru Ravidass, my family is also Ambedkarite (those that follow the teachings of Dr Ambedkar). I think my recent trip with Ambedkarite artists in India was enriching and makes me reflect on the similarities and differences in the experience of caste and the nature of resistance in the diaspora. Here in the diaspora we have the same spirit of resistance, we have social organisations and are documenting our stories and struggles. I am interested in how we are expanding the discourse around caste in India, how we build solidarities with other diasporic communities who similarly have political and social divisions that inform their communities in this country.

I think the cultural underpinnings have always been communicated. Showing in an Australian context early in my career I laboured a lot to explain caste wherever I showed my work. I think my own understanding of it is growing and as someone in the diaspora, I have often felt isolated and as one of the few artists to speak about caste in Australia. I’m still learning how to balance educating audiences with allowing the audience to come to the work, to discover and engage in their own time. If anything I think what is held in the work was more porous before, and now I am okay for it to hold its own. I don’t want the work to be reduced to just my cultural identity, I think ultimately I am interested in themes that expand the conversation around caste experience, for example in Albury there are material questions and relationships at play. We are each coming from our unique experiences, but we have commonality in material thinking.

Perhaps some of the thinking in that questioning comes from me arriving at your work relatively recently, really in the last five years or so. Also, in the context of the presentation at MAMA, there are strong material relationships between your work and that of the adjacent projects. But before we move on to considering some of those material dynamics, is there more you wish to reflect on from your recent travels? I get the sense from you that it has been quite an important period that will inform the ideas in your work from this point on.

Yes, I was invited by my friend Prabhakar Kamble to his village called Anur which is about an hour or so from Kolhapur. This is where Prabhakar, who is an artist, curator and convenor of the Secular Art Movement has his studio and where he was organising Ambedkar Jayanti to celebrate the birthday month of Dr Ambedkar and anti-caste reformer Mahatma Phule. I spent 10 days with him and his community. We had a film night, an exhibition, a rally and a week of programs. I was really moved by the grassroots activism that he does and it’s inspired me to think of how we in the diaspora work in solidarity with these movements. I’ve also been reflecting on the lateral solidarities we share as Australians born or connected to countries around the world and also how we build community as artists in Australia, particularly at a collective artist space like Parramatta Artist Studio. I think its easy to work in isolation and not feel the political urgency of these questions. But in my own way, I have started a reading group and film club within the artist studio and also for the Ravidassia community that I am part of. I was really excited by the intellectual engagement amongst my peers in India and I love bringing fellow artists and peers here in Sydney because we have so much richness, depth and commonality of experience.

Shared experience, collectively, and community is such an important part of arts practice, which can be somewhat solitary when it comes to the work that takes place in the studio. Can you talk a little then, about how your work manifests in the studio, as a process that can sit apart from or in closeness to a social practice?

That’s such an interesting question and if I thought about it, I wouldn’t know where to begin. But the engagement with social practice in the studio becomes embodied, it becomes play, material investigation that is intuitive, spontaneous, not planned or constructed. I walk into the studio with my research, my connection to community, but what happens then is beyond what I could imagine. I don’t quite know how to even describe what it is or how the studio processes come to be. Sometimes its monotonous as applying gold leaf or eruptive and messy as smearing tar onto hessian. It’s peeling, pouring, heating, melting, it’s all in the doing and I feel the works come from the skin of the studio…canvases that have been sitting in my studio for months or new works upon which the dust from the studio has settled.

I don’t document or photograph gatherings of my community and play it in the gallery space, the work comes from a knowing, an ease and a freedom that I think is my true inheritance as a Dalit woman. My time in the studio is a place for me to be in conversation with all that has come before me. I savour it.

Which certainly translates into the work. As an audience member, you can see and sense the meaningfulness of the process.

Would you speak to the specific materials that recur in your recent work? You’ve mentioned gold leaf and tar; copper is also a material to which you return. These materials clearly hold importance, which would be good to hear about, but then you've also told me in previous conversations that you imagine an end to using some, if not all, of them; as though you might exhaust your conversation with them.

I think first and foremost the materials come from a sort of fascination or obsession. Take tar for example, it exists in so many registers, it is an adhesive in these works, used in a way to pull off the surface of a painting, it is solid and dense, can be liquefied and diluted to a soft wash that I have applied over paintings, or cast in silicon mould as I have in the support paintings in the show. I have used it for years now, ever since I encountered it in my printmaking training. Copper too is such a solid, resilient metal yet when etched it becomes porous and paper-like. When it reacts to chemical patinas or the air, it turns to every colour. Gold is so fragile to work with in the form of gold leaf, but its brightness and luminosity contrasts to the tar in a way that is compelling to me. I was discussing this with Simryn Gill and she said that materials are language, which really resonated with me, they speak in a space when words fail at capturing complexity and contradiction.

Wax, pigment, coir, seeds…these materials are ancient, they have been used by humans, we have a familiarity and when they react together, they form surfaces that look like they are of the body.

I think sometimes I want to push the materials to their extremes, like recently I etched 2 metre sheets of copper in acid and it was a nightmare. So then I decide to never do that again. Or this work in Albury, I smeared tar over 10 metres or so. But knowing me, I’ll be back doing it again. A lot of these processes are unpredictable, they never work out as I want but always beyond what I could imagine. I will only recreate a process if something is left unsaid.

Pitch is part of nginha - here and now, celebrating the commissioning of new art and ideas as a vital part of the Museum’s activities.

All images by Jeremy Weihrauch