Kirtika Kain: 'Stone Idols'

Roslyn Oxley9 is delighted to welcome the new year with a highly anticipated exhibition of new works by Kirtika Kain.

I sought to create a work that captured the monumentality of early Dalit literature. I imagined centuries of accrual compressed like geological strata and set about forming this landscape. My materials are my words and they are not dictated, they come from the same embryonic silence from which the art is born. In the cacophony of these heightened times, it is this silence that I return to, that I know to be true.

—Kirtika Kain, 2020

Stone Idols features a large-scale material painting and a series of printed silkscreen works. Created during the lockdown, the exhibition is Kain’s visual response to The Prisons We Broke, one of the first Dalit feminist autobiographies. Using a rich array of religious materials, Kain translates the visceral language and imagines millennia of stigmatisation and suppression faced by India’s lower castes. Her work interrogates the idolisation of deities and beliefs that continue to bind her community to servitude.

This exhibition reflects the artist’s ongoing interest in shedding light to neglected histories, recasting the historical representation of her community and contributing to the dearth of surviving Dalit art and material culture.

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery is a certified COVID19 Safe Organisation. Visitor numbers are monitored, permitting 37 visitors inside the gallery at any one time. QR codes are to be scanned upon arrival.