Formed through slow, meditative processes of hand-stitching, wrapping, and dyeing, the installation weaves together Chowdhury’s lived experiences as a first-generation Bangladeshi-Australian artist. Each act of making becomes a gesture of remembrance—an embodied conversation with the women in her family, her mother and grandmothers, and the knowledge systems they carried through touch, craft and care.
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
'Surging through exits when the bell goes' is a design-led research project that examines how the aesthetics of high school environments and digital platforms shape the hidden curriculum of contemporary education. It traces how physical architectures of control have evolved into the visual and behavioural architectures of digital systems, focusing on behaviour monitoring systems.
'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.
'Steel Karkade' showcases the multifaceted experiences of Black women in the diaspora, as well as the artist’s South Sudanese heritage. For her, the livelihoods and narratives of her ancestors and the Black women who came before her are significantly underrepresented and unwritten; her practice endeavours to bring light and permanence to their stories and cultural history.
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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