Tania Willard, photograph by Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy of the artist.
Join us for a special evening with visiting Turtle Island (Canadian) artist and curator Tania Willard who will present a keynote presentation for the Future Memorials program.
Tania Willard is a mixed Secwépemc Indigenous and settler artist and curator whose research intersects with land-based art practices. Her practice activates connection to land, culture, and family, centering art as an Indigenous resurgent act, through collaborative projects such as BUSH Gallery, and support of language revitalisation in her Secwépemc community.
Tania is an artist in this year's 25th Biennale of Sydney, a recipient of the 2025 Sobey Art Award and visiting RMIT University as a guest of Yoonggama research cohort and Contemporary Art and Social Transformation (CAST) research group. Tania's visit to Naarm (Melbourne) is supported by RMIT's 2025 City North Activation Challenge and the Australian Research Council (DE240100038).
Following the keynote, attendees are invited to view the artworks commissioned as part of Future Memorials: Truth-telling is a civic responsibility, a public art program that envisions a future Naarm (Melbourne) that embraces truth-telling and celebrates First Peoples' cultural resurgence through bold, innovative, public art in civic (stolen) spaces. Devised as part of RMIT University's City North Activation Challenge, over 18th and 19th of March 2026 RMIT's city campus in Naarm (Melbourne) will be activated by artists Brooke Wandin (Wurundjeri), Vicki Couzens (Keeray Woorroong Gunditjmara), Jody Haines (Palawa) and Amy Spiers (Settler).
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.
'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.
'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.
Learn more about our commitment to Indigenous cultures
