Inheritance is an immersive installation that transforms everyday materials into vessels of memory, care and connection. Through fragile yet grounded forms made from broken gum tree branches, turmeric and handwoven Bangladeshi Khadi, the work explores how making can hold and pass on inherited stories across generations and geographies. Inheritance invites visitors into a space where belonging, displacement and care become intertwined acts of resistance.
Please join us to celebrate the opening of this exhibition at First Site Gallery, 5– 7pm, Wednesday 8 April.
Mita Chowdhury is an interdisciplinary artist and PhD candidate at RMIT University, Melbourne. Born in the river delta region of Bangladesh, her early life was shaped by the shifting rivers that made her family climate migrants within the country. This experience informs her decolonial practice exploring first-generation Bangladeshi-Australian identity.
Her practice engages feminist epistemologies and diaspora studies to investigate migration, memory and tacit knowledge as active sites of inquiry. Her practice also explores socially engaged art making with marginalised communities—particularly migrant and women's groups—positioning art-making as a space for belonging. Employing non-western methods of making, she explores embodied knowledge and language as tools for cultural preservation and connection.
Chowdhury has exhibited at the 2022 Asian Art Biennial (Dhaka) and in numerous solo exhibitions since 2021. Chowdhury received the RMIT Cultural Vision Scholarship (2022) and the Young and Emerging Artist Award from ADFAS Yarra (2023).
Image: Mita Chowdhury, 'The Fugitive Archive-1' (detail), 2025, Bangladeshi handloom Khadi, old sari, found gum tree branch and cotton threads. Image courtesy of the artist.
11am - 5pm Tuesday to Friday
Closed on public holidays
'Portable Stillness' (2025), is an ongoing spatial installation that explores how the making of miniature objects and floating altar-like displays can express memory, collection, and the domestic in transition. Motivated by the instability of diasporic living and continual relocation, Ko Jou Chen constructs handmade structures that carry memory and presence across her shifting environments.
Chloe Rose Thomas’ exhibition, 'Can I Hold You?' centres on queer community and embodied practices of care, exploring what it means to take traditional photographic portraits of non-normative bodies and the histories they represent.
'Slip' is a practice-led research project that explores the poetic qualities of the bluestones that have been discarded in recent construction works around RMIT University. Through the process of moulding and casting these stones into beeswax, Noah Bridger hopes to reimagine Melbourne’s urban landscape.
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.
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