TarraWarra Museum of Art has announced its 2026–27 program, bringing together major exhibitions, new commissions, live music and expanded opportunities to experience the Museum and its Collection.
Opening in September 2026, Waterways presents a new rehang of the Collection in the Eva and Marc Besen Centre, accompanied by exclusive Behind the Glass tours. In November 2026, Light Weight explores the material and poetic qualities of light through works from the Collection, a major site-responsive commission and loans from leading Australian contemporary artists.
In Autumn 2027, TarraWarra International returns with Under the Same Sky, a major joint exhibition developed with the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation at CSMVS, Mumbai, and presented across Australia and India. The tenth TarraWarra Biennial, This Hand of Mine, curated by Dr Mikala Tai, follows in July 2027.
Music also moves through the year ahead. The Museum’s inaugural composer-in-residence begins work in partnership with the Australian Art Orchestra, culminating in a world premiere at TarraWarra Live in November 2026. The Australian Chamber Orchestra returns to the Yarra Valley in February 2027 for two days of music, art and conversation at the TarraWarra Festival.
“The year ahead brings art, music, and conversation together in a series of original exhibitions, a renewed Collection display, and extraordinary performances in and around the Museum and its grounds,” said TarraWarra Museum of Art Director, Dr Victoria Lynn.
Behind the Glass: Waterways
Visible Art Storage – Eva and Marc Besen Centre: ongoing
In Wurundjeri Woiwurrung language, Tarrawarra translates approximately as ‘slow moving waters’. Curated by Emma Nixon, the new rehang of the Visible Art Storage in the Eva and Marc Besen Centre, Waterways, invites us to explore how Australian artists have depicted and evoked water since 1945 in the TarraWarra Museum of Art Collection.
Artists have always sought to capture the beauty of the natural world. Beaches, rivers, forests, waterfalls, gardens and harbours have long been subjects of the Australian identity and subconscious. The display screens of the Visible Art Storage feature iconic moments from the canon of Australian art history:
- Brett Whiteley’s ultramarine Sydney Harbour from Lavender Bay;
- Leonard French’s multi-coloured turtles and fish;
- Janet Laurence’s mossy forest canopies at risk of deforestation;
- Brent Harris’ surreal monochromatic ‘swamp’ tendrils;
- the strength of Judy Watson’s fish spine melding into her stained canvas;
- Imants Tillers’ metaphysical appropriation of a colonial Eugene von Guérard waterfall; and
- the glistening brushstrokes waving through Janet Dawson’s Ripple.
These works capture the life-giving force of water, and the powerful ways it sustains and nourishes our everyday ecologies.
Light Weight
Museum: 28 November 2026 – 28 February 2027
This playful exhibition explores the materiality and poetry of light, experimenting with light’s metaphorical and symbolic qualities, as well as its material and physical properties. Exploring light’s ability to elucidate and enlighten, make visible and splinter into a colour spectrum, the exhibition conjures poetic, generative and structural aspects of light, bridging the worlds of poetry and physics and informing how we perceive and exist in the world.
Light Weight features a rich selection of paintings and photography from the TarraWarra Museum of Art Collection, alongside a major site-responsive installation commission by Naarm-based artist Natasha Johns-Messenger and works on loan from leading Australian contemporary artists.
Clarice Beckett’s atmospheric tonalism appears alongside the intense chiaroscuro of Rick Amor and Louise Hearman; Godfrey Miller, Len Lye and John Passmore explode light into fractal arrays; the abstraction of the 1970s and 1980s finds meaning in the material forms of Robert Hunter.
Jeremy Eaton’s photosensitive dyes capture light directly onto canvas, while Len Lye’s hand-dyed scratch films are shown with Danica Chappell’s camera-less photography. The exhibition questions the apparent weightlessness of light. Rather, it is immaterial yet omnipresent, heavy with the load it carries.
Featured artists: Rick Amor, Clarice Beckett, Lynne Boyd, Arthur Boyd, Andrew Browne, Jon Cattapan, Danica Chappell, Ray Crooke, Russell Drysdale, Jeremy Eaton, Dale Frank, Mark Galea, Rosalie Gascoigne, Louise Hearman, Robert Hunter, Natasha Johns-Messenger, Len Lye, Taree Mackenzie, Tim Maguire, Hilarie Mais, Ross Manning, Godfrey Miller, Callum Morton, John Olsen, John Passmore, Lloyd Rees, Tim Storrier, Albert Tucker, Brett Whiteley, Fred Williams, Philip Wolfhagen.
TarraWarra Live featuring the Australian Art Orchestra
Eva and Marc Besen Centre: 29 November 2026
A World Premiere of TarraWarra’s Inaugural Composer in Residence, Biddy Connor; Structures We Inherit, a new work by AAO Artistic Director Aaron Choulai; and AAO First Nations Artist in Residence, Adam Manning.
An afternoon of live music featuring the World Premiere of a new composition created specifically for TarraWarra Museum of Art by Biddy Connor, the inaugural Composer in Residence, along with a full program of new work performed and composed by the Australian Art Orchestra.
Headlining the afternoon’s program is the World Premiere of a new composition by the inaugural Composer in Residence, Biddy Connor. The AAO will perform Connor’s new composition for string quartet, which sits at the intersection of music and visual art and draws inspiration from artworks in the Museum’s Collection and the surrounding landscape. Connor’s new work explores the resonant possibilities of tuning forks and strings, along with spatial improvisations across TarraWarra Museum’s garden and museum spaces.
TarraWarra Festival 2027 featuring the Australian Chamber Orchestra
Eva and Marc Besen Centre: 27 & 28 February 2027
A landmark event on TarraWarra Museum of Art’s summer calendar, the TarraWarra Festival returns in 2027 for two days of music, art and conversation in the heart of the Yarra Valley.
Led by Artistic Director Richard Tognetti, the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) takes to the Eva and Marc Besen Centre for a weekend of three concerts and a workshop, bringing audiences together across music, architecture, art and place.
Across the weekend, audiences will move between the two buildings, with chamber music programs performed in the Kerstin Thompson Architects–designed performance space, workshops and conversations with the musicians, and time to experience the Museum’s exhibitions during the closing days of Light Weight.
Set among the vineyards and indigenous garden on Wurundjeri Country, the Festival offers a unique opportunity to experience Richard Tognetti and the ACO in an intimate setting, where listening and looking inform one another.
Festival tickets will also include food and wine from the cellar door, making for an unforgettable summer weekend at TarraWarra. Full program details, repertoire, participating musicians and ticketing information will be announced soon.
Under the Same Sky
TarraWarra Museum of Art: 20 March – 11 July 2027
In a world always in motion, lived realities exceed narrow associations with geography. Under the Same Sky is a joint exhibition by TarraWarra Museum of Art, Australia, as part of the TarraWarra International 2027 series, and the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS Museum), Mumbai.
The artists live and work on Boonwurrung, Wurundjeri and Kamilaroi Country, Odisha, Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Athurugiriya, Dhaka, Sydney, Melbourne and Berlin, and together their works consider how we might understand the contemporary world – not through fixed ideas of origin, nationality or region, but through the connections, histories and conditions that shape how we live and share it.
Through myth, metaphor, humour, fact and fiction, the artists reveal personal histories, ancestral lineages and diasporic experiences, alongside systemic forces and colonial pasts whose echoes inform the present. Their chosen media – painting, film, photography, textile, sculpture, assemblage, installation and performance – carry histories and inherently loaded legacies of their own, which inform the work.
The works gather around acts of witnessing, contested borders, resilience and resistance, the creation and interrogation of archives, and the tracing and retelling of cultural traditions. Together, these works trace unexpected transcultural connections and tensions that make visible what is often left out of mainstream imaginings of the world.
Artists include: Khadim Ali, Sarnath Banerjee, Anju Dodiya, Gauri Gill, Simryn Gill, Shilpa Gupta, Sohrab Hura, Kirtika Kain, Yardena Kurulkar, Lavanya Mani, Brian Martin with Srinivas Gomango and Deeptimayee Patro, Amol Patil, Sangeeta Sandrasegar, Varunika Saraf, Mithu Sen, Hema Shironi and Munem Wasif.
The exhibition is co-curated by Dr Victoria Lynn, Director of TarraWarra Museum of Art, and Puja Vaish, Director of the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation (JNAF), Mumbai. Following its presentation at TarraWarra Museum of Art, a second iteration will be presented in Mumbai from 3 September 2027 to 16 January 2028.
This Hand of Mine
Tarrawarra Biennial: 31 July – 14 November 2027
There is a moment in the artistic process when everything stills. When the mind and body lock together and move with an intuitive rhythm, and the work appears as if manifested. It sometimes happens in the dead of night, or in an intense few hours that collapse into seeming minutes. In these moments, the act of making shifts from conscious thought to instinct, where an imperceptible alchemy seems to take hold.
Curated by Dr Mikala Tai, TarraWarra Biennial 2027: This Hand of Mine dwells in this moment, asking what spectral forces are at play. The exhibition brings together artists who, collectively, propose the gallery as a site of blessing. With The Hand of Mine marking its tenth edition, TarraWarra Biennial explores where ideas arise, reflecting on the influence of superstition, ritual, and the power of thought and belief.
Tai examines how artists draw on intuition, nature and material transformation to make sense of the world. Through works that engage the thresholds between the visible and the unseen, it invites audiences to consider the personal rituals, talismans and acts of faith that shape how we move through life.
Inaugurated in 2006 by TarraWarra Museum of Art’s founding Director, the late Maudie Palmer AO, the TarraWarra Biennial has presented the work of over 200 artists across nine editions, establishing itself as one of Australia’s most distinctive platforms for contemporary art. Each edition is conceived as an independent, experimental exhibition led by a guest curator: never a repeating format, always a distinct proposition.
Details of participating artists, the public program and the catalogue will be announced in 2027.
TarraWarra Day Trip
To provide wider community access, TarraWarra Museum of Art has launched a new TarraWarra Day Trip, offering return transport from Federation Square on the first Saturday of every month during exhibitions.
Departing Federation Square at 11.30 am, the bus takes visitors directly to the Museum in the heart of the Yarra Valley, with time to explore the current exhibition before departing TarraWarra at 4.00pm and returning to Naarm-Melbourne’s CBD at approximately 5.30 pm.
Limited to 24 passengers per departure, each ticket includes return transport and Museum entry. Visitors can also add a discounted Behind the Glass tour of the Eva and Marc Besen Centre’s Visible Art Storage, subject to availability. Food and wine are available at the neighbouring TarraWarra Estate cellar door.
For more information about TarraWarra Museum of Art, visit: www.twma.com.au for details.
Images: TarraWarra Museum of Art – photo by Rohan Shearn | Janet Dawson, Ripple No. 7, 1970. TarraWarra Museum of Art Collection, Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2010 – photo by Andrew Curtis | John Olsen, Sun Over the You Beaut Country, 2014. TarraWarra Museum of Art Collection, Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AC 2017, Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program | Biddy Connor – photo by Bryony Jackson | The Australian Chamber Orchestra at the Eva and Marc Besen Centre – photo by Thomas McCammon | Sohrab Hura, still from The Coast, 2020 (TarraWarra International 2027 – Under the Same Sky) – courtesy of the artist | TarraWarra Museum of Art – photo by Rohan Shearn