Nadia Hernández: Walker Street Kitchen

Exhibition Dates: 9 December 2026 - 27 February 2027
Walker Street Gallery and Arts Centre
Open 11am - 3pm, Wednesday to Saturday

Multidisciplinary artist Nadia Hernández (Venezuela/Australia) presents Walker Street Kitchen, a new exhibition exploring how memory, cultural knowledge and belonging are carried through food.

Developed over more than a year through conversations and exchanges across Greater Dandenong, the project brings together market traders, growers, gardeners, chefs and community members whose stories, skills and lived experiences have shaped the work. Following food from garden to market, kitchen to table, Walker Street Kitchen traces the recipes, memories, relationships and forms of knowledge carried along the way.

At the centre of the exhibition is Hernández’s first moving image work: a three-channel video and sound installation created with videographer Timothy Hillier and composer Lucreccia Quintanilla. The film features seven traders from Dandenong Market, gardeners and makers from the Dandenong Community Learning Centre (DCLC), Bunurong Elder Uncle Mark Brown, and chefs Tim Holland, Yasmin Rahman and Frankie Hadid. Bringing together moving image, sound, textiles and sculptural elements, the exhibition expands Hernández’s established practice while continuing her longstanding interest in memory, migration, storytelling and exchange.

Known for weaving personal and collective histories through vibrant visual languages, Hernández turns her attention to the politics and poetics of food, considering how knowledge is preserved through practice rather than documentation, and how cultural memory is transmitted through the everyday acts of growing, cooking and sharing meals.

Resisting the idea of the archive as something fixed, Walker Street Kitchen creates space for stories, knowledge and traditions to be encountered, activated and passed on. It reveals food as more than sustenance: a repository of memory, a carrier of cultural knowledge and a catalyst for connection across generations and communities.

Produced and presented by Greater Dandenong City Council. Curated by Miriam La Rosa. 

Exhibition cartography and zine designed by Hot Cottage, zine supported by Creative Victoria. 

Image credit: Mata en el jardín,  date unknown. Personal archive of Nadia Hernández.