New Art and Emotion series launches with a powerful group show exploring isolation, connection and digital yearning.
In a hyperconnected yet increasingly isolated world, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) is tackling one of the most pervasive feelings of our time. Opening this July, the major group exhibition Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry. examines loneliness not as a private shame, but as a shared emotional landscape that binds us together through art.
The show kicks off ACCA’s ambitious new Art and Emotion series, which will later explore rage and joy in coming years. Featuring 11 local and international artists working across painting, sculpture, tapestry, installation, photography and moving image, it dives into everything from doom scrolling and bed rotting to nightclub intimacy, memory and the quiet ache of everyday objects.
Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry.
- ACCA, Southbank
- Running Friday 3 July to Sunday 30 August 2026
- Free entry
- Open Tuesday–Friday 10am–5pm, weekends 11am–5pm
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.
View this post on Instagram
Highlights include Kayla Mattes’ massive seven-metre woven tapestry Lonely Planet 2026, which stitches together memes, screenshots and heartbreak symbols into a tactile comment on digital alienation. Seth Brown’s absurd animatronic hot dog endlessly scrolling for bread offers dark humour on online dependency, while Natasha Matila-Smith’s immersive bed installation invites visitors to literally lie down in the contemporary ritual of emotional exhaustion.
Other standouts include Polly Borland’s heavy sculptural figure embodying emotional burden, Gideon Appah’s paintings finding solace in Ghana’s coastal landscapes, and Kelly Yu’s darkly comic short film about the last goldfish on Earth. Local artists like Melissa Nguyen and Patrick Pound add layers of diaspora, identity and collected remnants of everyday life.
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,” says ACCA Curator Sophie Prince.
In a city that feels both buzzing and disconnected, this show arrives at the perfect moment – offering space to feel seen in our solitude. It’s a must-visit winter cultural highlight that promises to spark conversations long after you leave the gallery.
For more information on ACCA, head here.
