MELBOURNE.- In an era defined by hyperconnectivity, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art opened a major group exhibition Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry. examining loneliness not as an individual feeling, but as one of the defining emotional experiences of contemporary life, one that intrinsically connects us all.
Open until Sunday 30 August 2026, the exhibition inaugurates ACCA’s new Art and Emotion series, an ongoing program exploring the emotional states that shape our personal and collective lives. ACCA will continue the series by exploring the themes of rage and joy in 2027 and 2029 respectively.
Bringing together eleven leading local and international artists working across tapestry, painting, sculpture, installation, photography and moving image, the exhibition explores how loneliness is experienced, performed, mediated and resisted today - from doom scrolling and online confessionals to nightlife, memory, intimacy and the quiet poetry of everyday objects.
The exhibition offers audiences a space to encounter loneliness as both deeply personal and profoundly collective, and to consider how art and sound can give form to emotional states that often resist language.
ACCA Artistic Director and CEO, Myles Russell-Cook, said: “Emotion and art are not separate things, but shifting facets of the same kaleidoscope of human experience. Art both reflects and shapes how we understand the world. Are youlonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry. marks the first iteration of the Art and Emotion series at ACCA. What connects the artists and their work is not a shared medium, but a shared impulse: to give form to what we so often struggle to say aloud.”
ACCA Curator, Sophie Prince, said: “Although this exhibition invites us to meet in loneliness, it also moves beyond its legacy of shame and privacy, openly embracing the tragic, the humorous and the human, and offering a space to see and be seen.”
ACCA Chair, Dr Terry Wu, said: “ACCA is delighted to present the exhibition Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry., the first in its new Art and Emotion series. Bringing together local and international artists at various points in their careers to speak to the universal theme of loneliness is an ambitious task, and indicative of ACCA’s commitment to delivering exhibitions that are bold, inspiring and relevant to our times.”
Artists represented in the group exhibition include:
Gideon Appah – Lives and works in Accra, Ghana
Appah presents paintings and video works that explore solitude and the restorative relationship between people and nature. Inspired by Ghana’s coastal landscapes, his works Beyond the Shadows 2025 and Boy with a Bird 2023 consider the complexities of connection and the solace offered by the surrounding ocean and natural world.
Polly Borland – Lives and works between Los Angeles, USA, and Melbourne, Australia
Borland is recognised globally for her idiosyncratic visual language across photography and sculpture. For this exhibition, alongside a suite of smaller-scale sculptures, Borland contributes BOD 2023, a large-scale sculptural human figure that offers viewers a visceral metaphor for the burden of emotions such as grief, anxiety and exhaustion that can weigh on the body.
Seth Brown – Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA
Brown’s Frank 2024 features an animatronic hot dog endlessly scrolling online for images of bread. Through absurdist humour and kinetic sculpture, the work parodies digital dependency and the endless search for connection.
Lucy Liu – Lives and works in New York, USA
Liu presents paintings from her Shunga series 2008, a body of figurative works informed by the visual language and erotic traditions of Japanese shunga. Through intimate scenes, the series explores sexuality and vulnerability reflecting onthe complexities of connection and distance within relationships. Across these works, moments of closeness exist alongside feelings of isolation, acknowledging how loneliness can remain present, and sometimes become more acute, even within intimacy itself.
Natasha Matila-Smith – Lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, New Zealand
Matila-Smith, a Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Hine, Sāmoan, New Zealand and European woman, explores how intimate spaces can serve as both comfort and entrapment in her immersive installation If I die, please delete my Soundcloud 2019. Audiences are invited to climb into a minimalist bed in a pink-lit space and immerse themselves in a realm of common comforts. This work examines internet confession culture and emotional exhaustion by capturing the contemporary phenomenon of ‘bed rotting’.
Kayla Mattes – Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA
Commissioned by ACCA for this exhibition, Mattes’ Lonely Planet 2026 is a large-scale woven tapestry spanning nearly seven metres horizontally. Drawing on memes, screenshots and symbols of heartbreak, it evokes the distinct loneliness of life lived online. Mattes juxtaposes the intimacy, humour and alienation of digital culture with the slow, tactile, handmade process of weaving.
Callum McGrath – Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia
McGrath’s What’s after this? 2026 is a two-channel video installation exploring the transformative experience that can takes place in night clubs. Captured across three years in unnamed Melbourne nightlife venues, the content encourages the viewer to recognise that togetherness and solitude are not opposites, but intertwined aspects of the same experience.
Nick Mullaly – Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia
Mullaly’s luminous large-scale paintings are inspired by LGBTIQA+ club culture, capturing moments of pause, desire and emotional suspension. Reflecting on the period following COVID-19 lockdowns, Mullaly explores the mutual solidarity and agency he found in these spaces.
Melissa Nguyen – Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia
Nguyen’s new commission of three large-scale diptychs of rabbit skin glue painted on canvas explores cultural dissonance, translation, and identity. Her practice examines emotional estrangement and diaspora through ghostly, fragmented surfaces. Nguyen’s practice takes ‘self-Orientalism’ as a conceptual framework through which she questions the relevance of cultural identity in art.
Patrick Pound – Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia
Pound’s site-specific commission, The museum of loneliness 2026 brings together found photographs and collected objects drawn from his extensive archive. Through accumulation and classification, loneliness is presented as something embedded within the quiet remnants of everyday life.
Kelly Yu – lives and works in Los Angeles, USA
Yu’s Endling 2024 follows the final surviving goldfish on earth through a speculative and darkly comical short film. Blending absurdity and tenderness, the work reflects on companionship, extinction and existential isolation.
