For Kirtika Kain, a Delhi-born Australian artist, showing at the Kochi Muziris Biennale is a dream come true. She is particularly drawn to artist-curator Nikhil Chopra’s interest in embodied and affinitive histories,

The Biennale’s title, For the Time Being, holds different meanings for each artist. For myself, it was grounded very much in the site. I was drawn to Chopra’s idea of 'bodies as vessels of memory, as embodied archives, and as sites of muscle memory' and community. This resonates deeply with my practice.

As part of the Dalit diaspora, Kain is preoccupied with the absence of Dalit cultural life in museums and formal archives. For her, besides the body, ancient materials such as tar, copper and gold, serve as sites of history and memory. Eschewing a singular Dalit aesthetic, she is exploring the role abstraction can play in essaying the unspoken histories of these communities.

At the Coir Godown in Aspinwall House Kain is showing a series of etched copper plates along with smaller works on hessian and canvas board. About her recent experimentations she elaborates,

I have been exploring a lot around weight, accumulation, density, and porosity in the past few months, within a range of materials including copper, tar, and hessian.

The copper plates are suspended, one after another, from the ceiling. A trained printmaker, she decided during the etching process to leave the copper sheets in ferric acid for much longer than usual. Withered down to a paper-like surface, they might appear fragile but are heavy and resilient. The copper was then left to oxidise for a few days allowing it to take on different hues. Kain also coated it with a thick resin to prevent shedding but has discovered that the metal continues to react to the atmosphere, breathing and metamorphosising on contact with air. Serendipitously it is also evocative of the weathered patinas of the port city of Kochi.