Unkept explores the silences and unrecorded histories that museums do not collect and preserve. Artist Kirtika Kain asks how she might address these hidden stories, and the communities which are neither archived nor acknowledged.
Unkept: Kirtika Kain draws on Kain’s encounter with the Victoria & Albert Museum’s V & A East Storehouse, a space that sits between display and storage. During a research residency in East London, Kain was inspired by this model and adopts the Storehouse as a metaphor for a museum in transition: striving for transparency while grappling with the violence embedded within its own collections.
Working with ancient, elemental materials such as copper, tar, hessian and beeswax, Kain considers the cultural loss and the overlooked contributions of marginalised communities. She creates an intermediary zone - open crates and objects suspended between order and disorder, preservation and corrosion - revealing how imagination itself can become a form of remembrance.
Kain’s practice is grounded in her Dalit heritage and the history of anti-caste literature and song. Her studio operates as a site informed by history, yet open to imagining new possibilities. Through repetition and casting processes, Kain generates a fictional archive - one that exposes the aporia in the historical record and evokes the unarchivable legacies that resist containment.
Kirtika Kain is an artist and educator working on Dharug land. Combining elements of sculpture, experimental printmaking and painting, Kain’s practice draws from her Dalit lineage and investigates material histories and ancestral memory and the complexities of caste in the diaspora.
Kain’s labour-intensive studio practice engages ancient materials of ritual and labour — pigments, waxes, cotton, grains, gold, copper, tar and hessian— reclaiming their traditional religiosity and challenging notions of purity, sanctity and stigma. Her abstract works act as archaeological vestiges, reflecting on the unarchived body and the multiplicity of Dalit experiences across time and geography. Currently, her studio processes focus on the accumulation, weight, and porosity of materials, considering their inherent complexity and visceral resonance. Through abstraction and material play, her work evokes imagination as an act of remembrance..
Kirtika recently completed a studio residency at ACME London, supported by Creative Australia. She has exhibited in Wake Up Call for my Ancestors (2022), Berlin and Plea to the Foreigner, African Biennale of Photography, Mali (2022), Okkoota (2023) at Artshouse Melbourne, collaborating with critical Dalit voices in the subcontinent and diaspora. She has presented new commissions at the 24th Biennale of Sydney and 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2025-26).
Ann Stephen
Luke Parker
Coming soon. Open 13 February - 22 September 2026.
Penelope Gallery, Level 1
Chau Chak Wing Museum
Free
Header image: The Daughters’ Trilogy. Chapter II: Bindung & communion (Exhibition view), with work by Kirtika Kain, TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol, 2025. Commissioned by TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol for The Daughters’ Trilogy. Chapter II: Bindung & communion. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. Photo: Günter Kresser.
Commissioned by the Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney, and supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.
Phone: +61 2 93512812
Email: ccwm.info@sydney.edu.au
Chau Chak Wing Museum
University Place
Camperdown NSW 2050
