Bag of Rice for a Saturday Child unfolded as a deeply personal and immersive exhibition by Burmese-Australian artist Natalie de Rozario, tracing the tender, mythic, and sometimes mischievous stories that have shaped her cultural identity across time, place, and memory.

At its heart, the exhibition was sparked by a formative childhood moment—standing beside a Naga statue—and a story told by her grandmother: that she had once “bought” her Saturday-born grandchild for a bag of rice. From this intimate origin, the work unraveled into a layered exploration of how memory, ritual, myth, and ancestral intention travel across generations, shifting and reshaping as they move through migration and diasporic life.

Across charcoal drawings, paintings, installation, archival family photographs, oral histories, song, and inherited objects gathered over decades, de Rozario built a world where personal history and cultural mythology blurred. The exhibition invited audiences into a space where belonging was not fixed, but formed in the in-between—between countries, between stories, between what is remembered and what is reimagined.

The exhibition opened on the superstitious date of Friday 13 March at Zig Zag Gallery, where it was officially opened by Dr Pilar Kasat.

The public program expanded the exhibition’s conversation through a Burmese Artists Panel Discussion, a hybrid event held at Zig Zag Gallery and an online audience. The conversation brought together an international group of Burmese artists reflecting on how heritage, displacement, and the 2021 military coup have shaped their creative lives. Rather than offering fixed conclusions, the discussion moved through lived experience—navigating identity, distance, and the ongoing responsibility of carrying ancestral stories while creating from afar.

Facilitated by independent curator and scholar Nathalie Johnston, the panel featured Natalie de Rozario, Aaron Seymour, Richie Htet, Gabby Loo, and Khin Boe. Together, they shared practices that spanned visual art, design, performance, and sound—each responding to questions of memory, cultural inheritance, and survival in distinct yet interconnected ways.

Across both exhibition and programming, Bag of Rice for a Saturday Child became a space where myth met migration, grief met resilience, and the stories of elders continued to echo through contemporary practice.

Following its presentation in Kalamunda, the exhibition was announced to tour, with its first stop at DADAA Gallery from 15 May to 12 June.