Are you lonely tonight exhibit features works from film star Lucy Liu, plus Patrick Pound and Polly Borland
Doom scroll. Bed rot. Extinction. Dislocation. Insulation. In the internet age, these issues are discussed with fearless irony.
Australian Center for Contemporary Art opens this week Are you alone tonight? I’m so lonely I could cryA new exhibition featuring a scattered display of responses to loneliness in 2026 is part of a new series of exhibitions exploring art and emotion.
“The important thing was that it looked very simple but was an entry point to break down the nuances,” says co-curator Sophie Prince. “The world is spinning fast. Looking through a single lens like this can be completely different depending on when you do it.”
There are many questions: Are we really alone when we are constantly online? Are loneliness and the capacity for solitude unfairly denigrated? Prince and his colleague, ACCA’s artistic director and chief executive Myles Russell-Cook, brought together 11 artists from Australia and around the world to provide indirect responses.
Visitors are greeted by Russell-Cook’s goldfish, alone in a small tank, which takes us into a short film by Kelly Yu Finish (2024), a speculative mockumentary about the reality of species extinction, following the caretaker of the world’s last goldfish.
Animals and anthropomorphism that trigger empathy are repeated throughout the show. On the back floor, among Patrick Pound’s esoteric finds is an orangutan plushie from IKEA. The toy has been immortalized Punch, a Japanese macaque and the Ichikawa City Zoo resident, who became attached to the toy after being rejected by his macaque peers.
Pound’s collection, Museum of Loneliness (2026), temporary but loaded with meaning. A VHS tape labeled “Gulf War” by hand sits next to a statue of Jesus on the cross, a Lonely Planet guide to Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and a photograph of an unidentified woman with her face cut off. They are all scattered across the floor in search of context.
LA-based weaver Kayla Mattes contributes Lonely PlanetA massive seven-foot tapestry of internet moments and ephemera: memes, error messages, notifications, step counts, and search results were lovingly hand-sewn over a year. Punch the monkey appears here too.
Mattes’s and Pound’s works coexist, exploring ephemera in two and three dimensions; They will definitely discuss this issue at an artist talk on Saturday.
The doomscrolling continues with Seth Brown Franc (2024), one of the earliest works selected for the exhibition. It’s a hot dog attached to a mustard bottle, hitting the phone screen repeatedly, triggering an endless scroll through images of AI-generated bread. Like most things in the series, it’s extremely funny but full of wistfulness.
A few series of paintings explore more serious subjects: Melissa Nguyen’s enigmatic works with rabbit skin glue on canvas blur personal histories with historical ones, responding to the life her mother led before her birth, of which few photographs remain. Ghanaian artist Gideon Appah reveals the distinction between being lonely and alone in his videos and paintings.
In a double-take moment, the name Lucy Liu appears – yes, that name. A multi-hyphenate artist, Liu has mostly painted using her Chinese name, Yu Ling, for as long as she has been a movie star.
These extremely explicit paintings explore private lives and sexuality, drawing on Japanese Shunga erotica with their large areas of paint. The works themselves, the separation of their artistic productions and the idea of ”loneliness at the top” feed the theme of the exhibition.
Russell-Cook traveled to New York to meet Liu and discuss her involvement in the show. “His art is primarily for himself,” Prince says. “He’s very careful about how this is presented to the world and how it’s interpreted with the right intentions.”
This intentionality is a definite line in the show. “We never wanted to cram 50 artists in there,” Prince says. “There is real care in the process. We want space to communicate and be creative together.”
Natasha Matila-Smith If I die please delete my Soundcloud (2019) features an unmade bed with a laptop on it, endless scrolling, and defensively ironic internet talk. In the opposite corner are Polly Borland’s sculptures, which are distorted human-textile hybrids that reference Matila-Smith’s work and the idea of ”rotting.” They are feminine, fleshy, and surrounded by a lumpen ugliness.
Featuring only 11 artists, the exhibition is large enough to leave room for connections between the works. The cute sits next to the erotic, and loneliness emerges in the crowd. There’s a sense of play throughout.
Are you alone tonight? I’m so lonely I could cry It was conceived as the first in a series of shows about art and emotion at ACCA, and will be followed by shows about anger in 2027 and 2029 (All day long I felt like I was going to hit my face on a clear glass window) and joy (The world didn’t give me this joy I have, the world can’t take it from me).
Prince says the goal of these demonstrations is not to be definitive, but to open up connections.
“There’s a kind of legacy of shame and secrecy that loneliness instills,” Prince says. “People turn to art to privately process their loneliness. But here we do it together.”
Are you alone tonight? I’m so lonely I could cry At ACCA until 30 August 2026.
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Will Cox writes fiction and art criticism. Lives in Merri-bek.
