INHERITANCE, 2026
RMIT First Site Gallery, Melbourne
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.
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.
The material selection is deliberate and symbolic. Gum tree branches, gathered from the artist’s neighbourhood in Tarneit, form suspended frameworks that root the work in the Australian landscape. Khadi is a fabric central to Bengal’s anti-colonial Swadeshi movement, connecting to her family’s long legacy of activism and self-reliance. Into this fabric, poetry from anti-colonial resistance has been embedded, dyed with turmeric and stitched – an act of respect and homage, creating a connection between two cultural and linguistic erosions exploited by the same exploiter. The shared histories of linguistic loss between Bengalis and First Nations peoples deepen this gesture. Turmeric, long used in South Asian domestic, ceremonial and healing rituals, becomes both pigment and cartography – its scent and colour evoking intimacy, resilience and intergenerational knowledge.
Inheritance – Installation Views (images by Bernie Phelan)
