First Site Gallery RMIT University
Tuesday 19 May – Friday 12 June 2026
Slip by Noah Bridger
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.
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Boiling Matters by Elisa Zorraquin
Elisa Zorraquin’s exhibition Boiling Matters draws on her background in contemporary jewellery and industrial design. She creates participatory works that engage both body and soul, initiating encounters between individuals who might not otherwise meet.
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Portable Stillness by Ko Jou Chen
Portable Stillness 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.
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Can I Hold You? by Chloe Rose Thomas
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.
Exhibition documentation by Christian Capurro.
Opening night photography by Claire Armstrong.
First Site Gallery RMIT University
Wednesday 8 April – Friday 1 May 2026
Inheritance by Mita Chowdhury
Formed through slow, meditative processes of hand-stitching, wrapping and dyeing, Inheritance weaves together Chowdhury’s lived experiences as a first-generation Bangladeshi-Australian artist.
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Surging through exits when the bell goes by Hilary Dodd
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.
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Steel Karkade by Maree Nikimaya
Steel Karkade showcases the multifaceted experiences of Black women in the diaspora, as well as the artist’s South Sudanese heritage. For Nikimaya, 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.
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Oil & Fire by Huiyi Xiao
Huiyi Xiao’s performative videos explore the psychological and political tensions embedded in her lived experience as a member of the Chinese-Australian diaspora. Using her own body as a living archive, she translates personal memory and social critique into a visceral, poetic language.
Exhibition documentation by Christian Capurro. Opening night photography by Bernie Phelam.