Five Acts of Love: Tenderness as Resistance
Image credit: Five Acts of Love, 2025, Installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Naarm/Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.
In Five Acts of Love, curator Dr Nur Shkembi offers a profound and deeply felt exploration of love as more than emotion, but love as action, resistance, ritual and vulnerability.
Bringing together twelve artists from Australia and beyond, the exhibition unfolds across five acts: resistance, revolution, intimacy, memory, and annihilation. These acts don’t define the works but echo through them. Inviting us to feel first, then analyse and reflect rather than seek resolution.
Here, love is both political and personal. In a world of noise, Five Acts of Love creates space for silence, tenderness, for imagining a different way.
It’s not a spectacle. It’s a sanctuary. A reminder that love is always an act of courage.
The exhibition presents love through five acts: resistance, revolution, intimacy, memory, and annihilation, that often revolve around grief, longing, and loss. How did these distinct categories develop during the project's evolution, and what inspired you to frame love through this perspective?
I would suggest these are more akin to actions or manifestations rather than categories. As a curator, I am always thinking about my environment as the past, present and future, simultaneously. Seeking love is something that is consistent in the human condition, whether that be with family, community, friends, comrades, or romantic love. Artists often work with great vulnerability and are attuned to their environments, so much of that thinking comes from observing and interacting with artists, it also comes from poetry, and my continued seeking of knowledge in my own religious tradition, Islam. You’ll see hints of this in the exhibition; there is always light present in the show, and a meditative quality.
Love and the times in which we live can both expose and empower. How did you navigate the curatorial responsibility of holding space for such vulnerability, while also ensuring care and safety for the artists and the stories they’ve chosen to share?
When you work with artists, there must always be an element of trust, care, and in many ways, we are caring for one another throughout the process. The safety of the artists is, of course, something for a curator to consider, but it is also a team effort and reciprocal. An exhibition requires an army of workers, literally dozens of people work with, in and around the artists. When you are working with artists and art workers who do their job with integrity, much of it is organic. But that’s not to say that we rely purely on good vibes and happenstance. We come together purposefully and under the care of the leadership team at ACCA. They set the standard and have provided an environment where artists can do their job and present their work without compromise. That’s no small feat these days.
Image credit: Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, Familiar phantoms, 2023, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Naarm/Melbourne. Courtesy the artists. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.
Grief and longing reverberate through many of the works. How does the curatorial framework of Five Acts of Love shift or expand their meaning within this collective context?
Grief and longing are a narrative connection between multiple works. This can be seen, I believe, across multiple works; there are obvious states of grief and longing in works such as Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s Pretty Beach and Ali Tahayori’s Archive of Longing. Memory is also articulated as a form of grief or longing sometimes, so I think about Larissa Sansour and Soren Lind’s hauntingly beautiful film, Familiar Phantoms. I always work with art and artists that I can feel deeply, because for me art is a feeling before anything else.
I consider the curation of an exhibition, especially a group exhibition like Five Acts of Love, as tuning the volume on the artworks, not changing the unique tone. So, there will be elements of an artwork that become more obvious because they are being amplified or are tuning in with the frequency of another work. When artworks are experienced in proximity to one another, whether they be newly commissioned, recent or from the artist’s back catalogue, you get a sense of there being a thread of an idea, a feeling, or you may even pick up on a narrative. That is the great joy and challenge of curating – gently coaxing conversations with each work without speaking over the artist. The audience normally experiences an exhibition in layers: the aesthetic connections, narrative connections and then, like a whisper, there is the thematic. And it really is just a whisper. People may assume that the exhibition title and ‘in your face’ entry text is the big voice in the exhibition, but the theme should be like the cracked pepper on your pasta – it elevates the flavour but doesn’t overwhelm or change the dish. That’s a bit of a daggy take on curating, but we all get the food analogy, and the idea of how the right spices can enhance or carry a dish. And of course, the artist didactics keep us all honest. They often contain the direct words of the artists, or at least an articulation of their own ideas, history and research, which is a result of the direct input of the artist. The pasta analogy, really, that just my way of saying the artwork is everything.
Several of the artists draw on sacred traditions and spiritual practices. How do these elements reshape how love is perceived in the exhibition, not just as an emotion, but as a state of transcendence, ritual or surrender?
Great question, immediately Khaled Sabsabi’s At the speed of light (2016) is such a sublime installation. A genuine and quite vulnerable seeking of love of the Divine. I mention the word vulnerable because to put out into the world your very deeply personal beliefs, that is an act of vulnerability, which of course, is in fact an act of courage. The work is a culmination of science, mathematics and faith, a reflection of the artist’s Muslim traditions, and the notion of surrender, and of ‘letting go’ of the human ego. Khaled provides an in-depth explanation of the work as an offering (in five major languages) to the audience. The way in which Khaled brings these ethereal elements together is really something to experience in the space. To fully understand the work, you need to sit with it quietly, but to then also read and nourish your mind, there is a fascinating breakdown of the calculation of the speed of light and how and why, literally, the speed of light is being made apparent. It engages your heart and mind, but also goes beyond that.
Image credit: Khaled Sabsabi, At the Speed of Light, 2016 (detail), Installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Naarm/Melbourne. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.
The exhibition steps away from commodified or clichéd portrayals of love, instead reclaiming it as a deeply considered gesture. How did this inform your curatorial choices and the conversations you wanted to invite?
The stepping away from the cliched portrayals of love is, in a way, the counterbalance; its absence is what alerts us to the other forms of love. Because humans will always seek love. Curating with love at the heart of the exhibition immediately tells us this is a space for feeling. I hoped for audiences to slow down, to feel the art and reflect upon not only their own experiences, but also consider each of the artists, their work, their lives, their communities, and to understand this in proximity to our human condition.
Myles Russell-Cook describes Five Acts of Love as an invitation to consider love and “tenderness as a form of resistance.” What might a future shaped by this understanding of love look like and what role do you believe art plays in imagining, or even manifesting, that future?
Art helps us to see ourselves; it is a mirror, an apparition and an aspiration. To be reminded, as Myles says, of “tenderness as a form of resistance” is to understand that we as individuals, are powerful beings. Art is also a witness, a document and a hope for the future. If art wasn’t a powerful force capable of manifesting change, then why, throughout history, are the artists, thinkers, poets and writers always the first to be targeted by ultra-conservative or fascist style governments? Because imagination, like love, cannot be contained.
Image credit: Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Pretty Beach, 2019, Installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Naarm/Melbourne. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.
Five Acts of Love is showing at ACCA in Naarm/Melbourne until August 24, 2025
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