OPENING EVENT
SUNDAY 18 JANUARY, 2PM
exhibiting artists:
Claudia Chew and Jenn Tran, Aisyah Kirana, Uncletwis and Kaji Mundo, Mandeep Singh, Kyati Suharto-Martin, Priscille Xavier
Grained is a cross-cultural group exhibition curated by Playte in partnership with Blak Dot Gallery and Nongkrong Festival. This project 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.
Inspired by the Indonesian concept of lumbung - a communal rice barn that stores surplus harvest for collective benefit - Grained functions as a lumbung of stories. Each artist’s contribution becomes part of a collective resource, strengthening community bonds and offering a framework to think through how food shapes guidance, care, and cultural connection.
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.
EXHIBITION DATES: JANUARY 17 - FEBRUARY 8, 2026
Playte are a gastro-architect duo who use local food as a tool for collective healing. Their work is rooted in community - creating site-specific experiences that explore the intersection between art, architecture, and the politics of food.
Founded by Niyanta Sharma, an artist and architectural designer with Indian heritage, and Wesley Hauler-Winterford, a nutritionist and cook with Māori heritage. Together, Playte explores the joy of gastronomy.
