Material Storytelling: The Politics and Pedagogy of Everyday Materials

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Material Storytelling: The Politics and Pedagogy of Everyday Materials

22 Apr 2026
02:00pm - 03:00pm
FREE
Online, Melbourne
First Site Gallery | Storey Hall Basement, 344 Swanston Street, Melbourne

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This artist talk examines how material practice challenges western knowledge systems, foregrounding embodied, intergenerational ways of knowing through everyday materials, storytelling and acts of dyeing, stitching and wrapping.

Mita Chowdhury's talk will explore Material Storytelling as a practice that engages the politics and pedagogy of everyday materials. Drawing on her exhibition Inheritance, she reflects on working with turmeric, Khadi, reclaimed sari and found gum tree branches as carriers of intergenerational knowledge, memory and lived experience. Within this practice-led framework, materials are not passive mediums but active sites of knowledge production.

The work directly challenges western hegemonic systems of knowledge validation and the cultural erasures they sustain, asserting instead that knowledge is already embodied, intergenerational and situated. Through processes of dyeing, stitching and wrapping, Chowdhury mobilises material practice as a method of accessing and enacting this knowledge—refusing the authority of so-called scientific validation—while articulating the complex conditions of displacement, migration and in-betweenness.

This is a free event, no registration required.

Mita Chowdhury stitching artwork for Inheritance, 2026. Photo by Azan Hossain.

This event and exhibition is presented by RMIT University at First Site Gallery.

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Acknowledgement of Country

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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