Artists: Kirtika Kain - Fiza Khatri

Jhaveri Contemporary presents The Great Rebuild!, a new body of work by Fiza Khatri, alongside Chronicles by Kirtika Kain.

Both artists make works exploring identity, history, and social structures. Fiza Khatri is preoccupied with queer and feminist space-making. Kirtika Kain mines her Dalit identity and ancestry to examine inherited trauma and the social hierarchies of the caste system.

Khatri’s commitment to figurative painting is governed by a belief in storytelling as a site of radical creation and possibility, a strategy central to feminist and queer world-building and futurity. Their practice is centred on painting portraits from life which are then placed in fictitious compositions stitched together from imagined and perceived moments. This allows them to create alternate lifeworlds, including possibilities for repair. They are interested in tending to the world as they find it, and exploring possibilities of how else it could be.

A new body of drawings and paintings explores such possibilities through the lives of children. Scenes real and imagined feature children dressing up, playing games, building temporary homes and castles and constructing alternative spaces with objects found in most homes - cushions, fabric, kitchen utensils, books, and plants.

Children inhabit parallel worlds as spaces of possibility. While they exist alongside and are deeply influenced by the material conditions and realities of adult worlds around them, they also remain open to living through the liberating potential of play. Like feminist and queer communities, children inhabit multiple realms at the same time.

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

Kain presents Chronicles (2025), a series of suspended copper plates alongside Mimetics (2025), works in tar and gold leaf. Both bodies of work were created in London and exhibited at the recently concluded Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Through heating, embedding, casting, acid exposure, or oxidation, Kain unearths various registers of copper—shiny, solid, brittle, and crumbling. Cotton lamp wicks, dipped in tar, are embedded into the copper plates. Her intuitive approach to each of these ancient materials gestures at rich, multiplicitous Dalit histories that are undocumented but have been passed on, at least partially, through memory, embodiment, and a relationship with the earth.