LOVE

Exploring all forms of loving connections between humans, Melbourne’s Immigration Museum presents in partnership with Heide Museum of Modern Art, LOVE this Summer.

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.

The 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 loaned 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.

Highlights of the exhibition 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; and 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.