Blackdot Gallery: Grained Exhibition
2026

Grained is a cross-cultural group exhibition that stitches together teachings of intergenerational and collective cultural practices, using rice as both nourishment and a vessel of shared histories across the Global South.

Bringing together artists from diverse migrant and Indigenous communities who share a cultural connection to rice, Grained explores themes of migration, identity, and belonging. Drawing influence from the Rice Theory of Culture, the exhibition examines rice-based processes - harvesting, storing, planting, and communal sharing - as catalysts for interdependent ways of living.

Through installation, sculpture, spatial intervention, mixed-media works, and public programming, Grained gathers cultural knowledge, lived experience, and memory into a living archive that continues to nourish beyond the exhibition itself.

By highlighting how a single ingredient connects people across borders, Grained positions rice as a powerful symbol of sustenance, resilience, and interdependence, opening fresh conversations about cultural experience in contemporary Australia and the wider Global South.