In Chronicles (2025), viewers are invited to witness the volatility and swathes of time that inscribe the series of suspended, sea-green copper plates with layers of crusting, peeling patina. Cotton lamp wicks, dipped in tar, are embedded across the plates. Here, a familiar material becomes unrecognisable in an altered context. Through heating, embedding, casting, acid exposure, or oxidation, Kain unearths various registers of copper—shiny, solid, brittle, and crumbling.  Kain’s intuitive manoeuvring of each of these ancient materials and their potency gesture 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.

- Aparna Chivukula