LOVE is coming
Groundbreaking new exhibition opens at Immigration Museum December 1.
What is love? Where is the love? Who do you love?
Melbourne's Immigration Museum will ask the big questions this summer. Opening December 1, LOVE explores all forms of loving connection between humans. Presented in partnership with Heide Museum of Modern Art, LOVE is Immigration Museum as you have never seen it before.
Soulmates. Friendship. Desire. Devotion. Grief. LOVE will boldly investigate the most common and visceral of all shared human experiences. It fearlessly tells intimate stories that will lift your heart, fill it, break it, challenge it. It will explore LOVE in all it's storied forms, through visual art, aural and written storytelling, and objects.
This summer, Immigration Museum begins its exploration of the universal themes that connect us all, beginning with LOVE. The exhibition presents Australian love stories of all kinds that traverse landscapes of time, gender, orientation, ethnicity, age, and distance. They reflect Immigration Museum's commitment to celebrating all communities and highlighting our shared humanity.
The design is striking and contemporary, warm and welcoming. LOVE will offer a sensory experience in Immigration Museum's spectacularly renovated historic Long Room. Visitors will be guided through the space by first-person love-storytelling delivered via a tailored digital guide, and carried along by an all-Australian musical soundtrack. Wander through purpose-built, immersive "love shacks." Then, commit your own love story to the central Heart Garden installation.
And where better to search for enduring and evocative love stories than Melbourne's beloved Heide Museum of Modern Art? Since the 1930s, Heide has provided the backdrop for some of Australia's most fascinating and compelling love stories. LOVE features works from the Heide Collection by key Australian artists: Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester, Albert Tucker, Sam Atyeo, Mirka Mora, and Richard Larter. Displayed alongside intimate photographs, these works recount the entangled intimacies of the Heide circle of artists.
Other love stories include:
- Melbourne performance artists The Huxleys romantic, creative, glitter-bound love story
- The aching love for absent children felt by admired visual artist Mirka Mora
- The Cypriot bride, whose new husband rowed into Port Phillip Bay to greet her with sweets
- A mother from South Sudan who risked everything to give her son a future
- An unlikely nineteenth century friendship between an Wurundjeri Elder and a white Scottish woman
Museums Victoria's fabulous state collection has been combed for personal effects, cultural artefacts, letters, images, and artworks that tell love stories. Generous community members have loaned precious personal items, shared experiences, and created specially-commissioned artworks. Experienced together, the results are moving and wondrous.
This collaboration of two significant Victorian cultural institutions marks the beginning of a process of re-imagining what Immigration Museum can be. In its twentieth year, Immigration Museum presents LOVE; the first stage in an evolution that will solidify the museum's position in Victoria's world-famous cultural landscape.
Love is for everybody. Let the summer of LOVE begin.
LOVE
Opens at Immigration Museum December 1, 2018
400 Flinders Street, Melbourne VIC 3000
Free with museum entry
Interviews available with:
- Curatorial and exhibition development team, Museums Victoria
- Curatorial team, Heide Museum of Modern Art
- Rohini Kappadath, General Manager, Immigration Museum
For media enquiries and more information contact:
