An indelible, velvety voice fills the room. The words, spoken in Arabic, are captioned on screen in Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s film Familiar Phantoms (2023) : ‘It starts with a well’. The room is dark, the walls are painted black, and I am seated in the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s (ACCA) latest exhibition Five Acts Of Love. I watch as the screen overlaps family photos and video footage of run-down, empty rooms. Sansour is recounting the story of her great-grandfather's exodus from Palestine in 1916. For a second, lost in the darkness of the exhibition, I too feel confined to the bottom of a well. Alone and vulnerable, personal memories of displacement, longing and war reach their crescendo.

I have known curator Dr Nur Shkembi for many years; our interactions are brief, but always important. At the opening, it was like a moment of coming together. I felt seen, understood and validated by Nur. The love explored in this exhibition was unlike the type of love I have been unable to grapple with, the one of my adolescence: a conditional love centred around what someone did for you. Exhibited here is a love that is encompassing, vast, accepting, beautiful and most of all, melancholic. My many attempts to write this review always seemed to be missing something or trying to contain too much. In the catalogue, Nur writes that ‘A curatorial essay is ordinarily meant to be an intellectual exercise of sorts, centred around a theme, embedded in an objective piece of research.’¹ On the subject of love however, Nur did not want to write something that was ‘trying too hard to be an essay.’² I thought I would take a leaf out of her book, and in honor of the exhibition, write a reflection on each of the five acts of love therein: resistance, annihilation, memory, intimacy and revolution.

1. Resistance: Love is difficult

 It might come as a surprise to visitors that Sansour and Lind’s film on loss, displacement and war would be included in an exhibition about love. It might further surprise you that all works by the twelve national and international artists, Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Hoda Afshar, Megan Cope, Eugenia Flynn, D Harding, Saodat Ismailova, Khaled Sabsabi, Larissa Sansour & Søren Lind, Yhonnie Scarce, Ali Tahayori and Hossein Valamanesh, explore similarly difficult themes; whether it be grief, nostalgia, yearning, suicide, exile, or the destruction of land.

Nur does not shy away from complex love. The works are an assured reminder that love is vast and multifaceted. They resist the pressure to view love as complete, perfect, possessive, idealistic and often unattainable. It is in this resistance, to reject the façade of blissful love and instead speak the truth of the difficult and the painful, as it is what enables love to flourish. As Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet, ‘It is also good to love because love is difficult’.³ 

2. Annihilation: Love is divine

At the heart of the exhibition are words by the great Muslim scholar and poet Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī and his notion of annihilation (fanaa), a self emptying—or ego death—that allows you to experience ‘the ecstasy of finding spiritual or other-worldly love and love of the Divine’.⁴ From the moment you enter the gallery, it is as though you are being asked to let go, to slow down, to adjust your eyes and to be mindful of where you are. Logic can only get you so far in understanding the metaphysical. Nur prepares us to be open, to set aside what we think we know, and receive this unexpected type of love.

Annihilation of self is a slow, long and meta process. But Nur encourages us to start somewhere tangible. To pay attention for example, to the colour black. It is the colour of every wall in the gallery. The resulting darkness is a welcoming and safe place for visitors to untether. Immersed amongst the black painted walls gives us agency to notice that black is not just black, that it is rich, multidimensional and deep. If we can start small, focusing on unpacking what we think we know about something as simple as the colour black, then expanding our curiosity and agency to experience the Divine, or love, or the metaphysical, is possible. Nur has opened the door for us. In Hossein Valamanesh’s The lover circles his own heart (1993) (Paris edition 2017), the white silk fabric gracefully rotates in a circular motion, evoking ‘the twirling, trance-like dance of whirling dervishes’.⁵ The opacity of the black walls absorb any light, becoming a dais to let the love emitted with each rotation, shine.

3. Memory: Grief is the transition of love into memory

I discovered during my research on the exhibition that one of the most transformational events that happened to Rumi, was the loss of his spiritual mentor Shah Shams Tabraiz. Rumi’s profound grief was metamorphic, dedicating his life to poetry in honour of his mentor. Grief is an inevitable part of being human; love and death live as equals. Rumi once wrote ‘Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.’⁶ But I ask, where does it go?

The exhibition is filled with many works that try to find the place where love goes after grief. Take Yhonnie Scarce’s N0000, N2359, N2351, N2402 (2014). Four cracked glass domes are lined on a plinth, three of which contain a portrait of Yhonnie’s ancestors marked with an identity number, the fourth, a blown-glass Indigenous fruit. Inspecting each dome feels akin to looking at specimens in a jar. Yhonnie references colonial policies prior to the 1967 Referendum, where ‘Aboriginal people were classified under the Commonwealth Government’s Flora and Fauna Act, and not thought of as human beings.’⁷ Despite the pain of her intense research in the South Australian Government archives, Yhonnie bears witness to her ancestors’ stripped humanity to memorialise the truth. Here, grief and love work in tandem to never forget their memory.  

4. Intimacy: With gentle hands

Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s installation, Pretty Beach (2019) is a monument to his Grandpa Cliffy’s suicide sixteen years ago. A fever of eleven Estuary Stingrays lay on the floor as though gliding. Illuminated by the 1800 strands of ballchains suspended from the ceiling, glistening, they resemble both flickering light and spitting rain. I’ve since come to learn that stingrays often swim alone, only gathering together during breeding and migration.

The glistening light of the reflective ballchains and the deep shadows underneath each stingray’s tail captures fleeting moments of Abdul-Rahman’s childhood summers spent along the shores of Central Coast New South Wales, where Grandpa Cliffy lived. Abdul-Rahman recalls watching stingrays disappear from the surface of the gentle blue, as a blanket of rain disrupted the water's surface. The memory, perhaps only a matter of seconds, is immortalised by Abdul-Rahman’s gentle and intimate craftsmanship: the meticulous detail of each stingray, which are carved from wood and then painted, and the fragility of each hanging ballchain, its reflected light glimmering like ocean water. 

If true love is accepting someone as they are, their strengths, weaknesses and choices, to never idealise but embrace their complexity, then Adbul-Rahman’s work is testament to this kind of love. Despite being devastated by the loss, he accepts his grandfather's passing stating, ‘While it took the wind from us there was a sense of easement in his decision that we understood.’⁸ His grandfather in turn mirroring that love ‘holding pictures of us kids and letters we'd written’ as he faded into the eternal and the rain returned.⁹

5. Revolution: A foundation for hope 

Despite the pain, suffering and loss that lies so closely to love, the works are a beacon of light in the dark of both the exhibition and this bleak and devastating world. At first glance, Sansour and Lind’s film is a confronting and harrowing history of Palestinian oppression. Yet it is in the telling of her ancestor’s survival, that we know of the strength and determination in Palestinian resistance. 

Khaled Sabasabi compresses 218 hours of footage into a single-second video in At the speed of light (2016) in a complex intersection of science, philosophy, art and religion. Is his quest to understand ‘If we are able to travel at the speed of light, will we be able to enter and interact with the unseen realms?’¹⁰ Is it not an endeavor of hope to be united with divine love? Is Abdul-Rahman’s Witness (2025), a life-size sculpture of a Palestine mountain gazelle—which are highly endangered and rely on vigilance and speed for survival—not the embodiment of resilience?

In the pursuit for revolution for a just and fair world, for a free Palestine, there needs to be a revolutionary process that actively transgresses the surface level of our colonial, consumer capitalist society. Nur’s choice to curate an exhibition on love, in all its difficult and beautiful forms, is a testament to her process, to her hope that love will continue. These pockets of hope, the search for love is what allows us to move forward and not give in to the inevitability of grief and pain.

As I reflect back on the exhibition, sitting alone in the darkness, I realised that a well is not a bad place to begin. Wells are water sources but also symbols of connection, knowledge and gateways to other worlds. Just as a well is a source of life, so too is this exhibition. These five acts of love; resistance, annihilation, memory, intimacy and revolution are a testament to the complex and multifaceted ways love continues to sustain us through loss, displacement and war. It is a reminder that love can be difficult but also divine.