Five Acts of Love: ACCA Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

Ali Tahayori, Yhonnie Scarce

27 Jun - 24 Aug 2025

Five Acts of Love features twelve local and international artists presenting newly commissioned, recent and more historic works across a range of mediums that explore the unexpected and nuanced manifestations of love as an intrinsic action, one that can harness the utmost depth of our humanity beyond pop culture references to romance and kitsch images of love.

Five Acts of Love offers space for reflection and an opportunity to delve into profound internal and external truth-telling through the exploration of various acts of love. The exhibition revolves around five acts: resistance, revolution, intimacy, memory and annihilation. Each act of love circles around what we ultimately relinquish when we love – and are loved.

Love is broadly seen as an intimate emotional and/or physical convergence between people. There is also parental and familial love, the love shared between friends, siblings or community. Or there is the ecstasy of finding spiritual or other-worldly love, of annihilation (fanaa) and love of the Divine. In this current moment it is difficult not to see love in proximity to the tumult and turmoil of the world. We see love manifesting in great numbers, as solidarity between communities, comrades and between complete strangers in various movements across the globe. We also see the love of individuals, and of humanity, and even in nature as a form of resistance, ever evolving, anew.

The assembled works offer love as loss, and as conversations about grief and yearning. Love is also presented as memory and memorialisation. Resistance and revolution are reimagined through the earth and continued connection to it, whilst intimacy is presented within the gentleness of familial gatherings, and the company of comrades. Love is also present in the emotional register that tunes into the spiritual, and the complete letting go that encompasses love of the Divine.
Reflecting upon the words of the great Muslim scholar and poet Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, to love is to risk everything.
Guest curated by: Dr Nur Shkembi OAM

Featuring: Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Hoda Afshar, Megan Cope, Eugenia Flynn, D Harding, Saodat Ismailova, Ali Tahayori, Larissa Sansour & Søren Lind, Khaled Sabsabi, Yhonnie Scarce, Hossein Valamanesh.

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art | 111 Sturt St, Southbank VIC

Artist Talks: Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Megan Cope, Khaled Sabsabi and Ali Tahayori
Sat 28 Jun | 11:30am

Join artists Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Megan Cope, Khaled Sabsabi and Ali Tahayori for talks in the gallery, on their works presented as part of Five Acts of Love.

Featuring twelve local and international artists presenting newly commissioned, recent and catalogued works across four galleries, Five Acts of Love offers space for reflection and an opportunity to delve into profound internal and external truth telling through the exploration of various acts of love. The exhibition revolves around five acts: resistance, revolution, intimacy, memory and annihilation. Each act of love circles around what we ultimately relinquish when we love – and are loved.