a bit thing Featured Artworks

Dr Paola Balla, Katen Balla & Rosie Kalina

a bit thing invites you to step inside a fantastical Blak family home – a space where art, pop-culture and Koorie culture are inseparable from everyday life.

Hallway 

1. Mali (Age 5), Protect Blak Kids, 2025, acrylic paint on cardboard protest banner (Invasion Day, Naarm) 
2. Rosie Kalina, Katen & Mali, 2025, photograph (Invasion Day, Naarm) 
3. Paola Balla, Rosie & Katen, 2025, Paola Balla, photograph (Invasion Day, Naarm) 
4. Paola Balla, Family photos, 1970s-2026, family collection. 
5. Family assorted awards and certificates, 1990s – 2025, facsimile. 
6. Paola Balla (2018), Margie the Matriarch digital pigment print on 188gsm photo rag 

Katen’s Room 

The room is an amalgamation of the things that have informed my upbringing.  My photo wall includes over 150 photos I have taken of my friends over the past six months around Footscray. My room includes a tribute to my best friend Bobby, who passed away. The culture corner contains cultural items I have been gifted.   
– Katen Balla 

1. Katen Balla, Assorted photographs of Footscray, 2026.  
2. Katen Balla with Sonny, Ziggy, Jacko, Rex, Cooper and Aiden, Wardrobe, 2026.  
3. Katen, Sony, Ziggy, Jacko, Rex, Cooper and Aiden, Mirror, 2026. 
4. Katen Balla, Assorted personal cultural items:  

• • Possum Skin Pelt 
  • Kangaroo skin by Iluka Sax-Williams 
  • Clap sticks and boondi carved by Wil Austin 
  • Aboriginal Flag 

Rosie’s Room 

An abundance of pink hues, painted portraiture, references to nostalgic memories, childhood fascinations and tributes to family weave together a bedroom dreamscape representing my inner world. This is a love letter to all the Queer Blak sheep, highly sensitive babes, and the ‘airy fairies’ - may we never lose our childlike sense of wonder.   
– Rosie Kalina  

1. Rosie Kalina, When you look at yourself for too long & stop recognizing your own reflection, 2026, digital painting, self-portrait.  
2. Rosie Kalina, No is a full sentence, 2026, digital painting series.  
3. Rosie Kalina, Self-portrait, 2026.   
4. Rosie Kalina, Untitled, 2026, weaving raffia and polymer clay.  
5. Rosie Kalina, Rain Bow, 2026, weaving wool and rope.  
6. Rosie Kalina, Nan at the Rodeo, 2026, acrylic paint on wood frame.  
7. Rosie Kalina, I’m not a woman, I’m not a man, I’m something that you’ll never understand, 2026, digital print, self-portrait.  
8. Rosie Kalina, Bratz Girl, 2026, digital painting. 
9. Rosie Kalina, Pepeny (baby), 2026, digital painting.  
10. Rosie Kalina, Spider-Web, 2025, acrylic paint on wood canvas.  
11. Rosie Kalina, Lar, 2025, acrylic paint on wood.  
12. Rosie Kalina, Untitled Weaving, 2026. 

Living Room 

These spaces hold memories and stories of our life as a little Blak family and Westies in Footscray. We are Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara, from the Day and Egan families, with Calabrese, Chinese, Irish, Scottish, Hungarian blood too. We have relatives from Gunditjmara Country, all the way to Wemba-Wemba Country; Kolety, Dhungala, and Kiella Rivers and beyond. We make art, take photos, have feeds and yarns about everything from culture, family stories, film, tv, history. To survive the colony, we practice healing by weaving our love of learning and sharing, listening and looking after each other. It’s how we stay strong in ourselves, with unconditional Blak love.
– Dr Paola Balla  

1. Paola Balla, Golden billy-button chandelier, 2026, painted billy buttons, glue, gold glitter, bush dyed fabric. 
2. Paola Balla, I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST CENTURY, 2012, plastic magnets, vintage wooden map of australia.  
3. Rosie Kalina, WEMBA-WEMBA, 2026 plastic magnets, vintage wooden map of australia. 
4. Paola Balla, YOU PEOPLE, 2012 plastic magnets, vintage wooden map of australia  
5. Paola Balla, Blak Madonna, 2026  
6. Paola Balla, Blak Madonna Dreaming, 2025, digital print, polyester woven fabric, artist’s Madonna scrapbooks 1983–93, painted billy buttons, bush-dyed silk organza with synthetic polymer paint 
7. Rosie Kalina, Nanny Rosie’s Portrait, 2026, digital print.  
8. Rosie Tang, Childhood Memories, 1988, original handwritten poem, mounted on board 
9. Rosie Tang, Untitled, 1978, 2 x paintings. 
10. Paola Balla and Rosie Kalina, Assortment of woven baskets 
11. Assorted family photos and memorabilia, courtesy Paola Balla.  

Blakyard & Throughout the House 

1. Paola Balla, Assortment of bush-dyed calico and silk organza banners, 2019 – 2026. 
2. Untitled Wallpaper, 2021. Large-scale reproduction of Rosie Tang’s Untitled, 1978. 
3. Paola Balla, Mok Mok Murrup Yakuwa, 2023, single channel video, 5:51 minutes. 
4. Paola Balla, Mok Mok the Matriarch, The Mok Mok Cooking Show I, Sovereign Goddess Going to Eat You Up, Woke Up Like Dis, from the series Mok Mok 2016, digital pigment prints. Courtesy of MUMA Collection. 

Supported by –

This exhibition and program is an expression of Arts House’s Equity—Builder, where an artist-curator is handed over the keys, spaces and resources to lead a curatorial project in an effort to renew the relationship between the institution, independent artists and marginalised communities.

Image Credit: Rosie Kalina, with photographs supplied from a family collection
Image Description: A collage style image in pastel tones, incorporating an archive of family photographs and flora overlays.