Mimetic Mass

“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, 2025

In her most recent exhibition with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Kirtika Kain pushes her exploration of humble materials and their ability to connect deeply to history, providing a pathway to ancient times, while connecting community and thought. Kain uses varied materials as a point of departure to voyage into unarchived histories, using the imagination to find its way in the dark weight of the past, to find light through an untrodden path. By employing materials of labour or ritual, through the process of abstraction, a liminal space between the conceptual result of her creations and the tangible, tactile nature of the materials reveals an open space for new possibilities to exist.

This space in mimetic mass takes inspiration from the concept of ‘mimesis at mid-point’ of the AfriCOBRA movement. Born from the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements in 1968, Chicago, AfriCOBRA, an acronym for The African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists, connected African diaspora artists with a methodology and manifesto. Similarly, Kain’s artworks gently create an opening for Dalit stories to be retold and a history repositioned.

Within the layered intent of these dazzling works are sumptuous dreamscapes of gold leaf and burnished copper, where relics in glinting sea green mingle with metallic blood red that drips through the gilded skin of time. Works appear to be excavated from the twinkling heavens above or unearthed ruins from the depths below – they are delicate, fragile remnants from the past yet embedded firmly in the fictions of our time.

A group of works containing melted wax mixed with charcoal and tar form images like molten lava, flecked with gold that becomes tiny glimpses of the resilience of Dalit civilisation amongst a mass of smouldering black, bringing knowledge into the unknowing dark.

Anchored by the curtained backdrop of an epic and enduring weight is her major piece Midnight. Histories are held together in a night sky – the weighty drape of the past in tar, blue pigment and gold leaf, at once suspended in space, appearing to float and move yet groaning in heavy stillness – the inherent ambiguities creating a palpable tension.

The midpoint of abstraction allows the vastness of an ancient history to be contained in a space of poetic contemplation, as the peeling facades of antiquity expose the truths of inheritance in current time. In Kain’s earthly universe, hard truths exist together in a dance of magic and possibility.

- Victoria Scott