Bed rot, doomscrolling and a single goldfish: the Melbourne art show blowing loneliness open

A forlorn goldfish called Pao Pao stares from its sparse tank at the entry to Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry – a new exhibition on loneliness at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Acca) in Melbourne.

“He’s part of my family, he’ll be coming back to the big tank,” says the exhibition’s co-curator, son of a veterinarian and Acca’s artistic director and CEO, Myles Russell-Cook. He owns several fish and has named this one after the hypothetical last goldfish on Earth depicted in Kelly Yu’s short film playing in the next room, Endling.

Are you lonely tonight? is the first exhibition in a series exploring “art and emotion” (joy and rage come next). With works from 11 artists, including Ghanaian artist Gideon Appah, LA artist Seth Brown, Melbourne-born artist Polly Borland and the actor-painter Lucy Liu, it’s a tragi-comedy for the restlessly online that attempts to delineate loneliness from being alone; connectivity from connection.

“Loneliness for me is like being hungry, not knowing what you need or what will satisfy you, like you’ve fallen out of the world,” says Russell-Cook. “We have a loneliness epidemic that resists definition. It’s a kaleidoscope.”

Inside the exhibition is an assemblage of found objects placed here by the Aotearoa artist and archivist Patrick Pound, who has more than 70,000 found photographs among his vast collection of basically everything. Like me, but for art, Pound spends hours scrolling eBay for objects that take his fancy. Dozens from his archive are laid out on the floor as Acca’s new commission, The Museum of Loneliness.

“To spend six hours a day on the internet is sort of a tragic thing to do. It’s not that nice a lifestyle. But I’ve also made a community there,” says Pound. “I’ve grown an international community of sellers, buyers, collectors as friends, maybe. I used to avoid them [but] they’re nice people.”

Pound’s objects on display here include an Ikea orangutan soft toy made internet-famous as the companion to Punch, a baby Japanese macaque rejected by its troop at a Japanese zoo. There’s animal trinkets, a baby Jesus, LPs, VHS tapes and a DVD of Steve Martin’s The Lonely Guy. If you look hard enough, you will find the loneliest guy: an absolutely tiny miniature of a man that most people won’t notice. A discarded single-serve Mentos wrapper nearby could be part of the museum, but isn’t. A Lonely Planet edition is: it’s titled Israel, underneath which is its subtitle a few font sizes smaller: & the Palestinian Territories.

A prone puppet lies flat on its back, arms outstretched, staring into the void. The exhibition’s co-curator Sophie Prince assumes a similar position when she’s spiralling.

“I definitely go kind of catatonic. I lie down a lot. I try to blank out the brain chatter that isn’t helpful,” says Prince. “[Loneliness] is a chemical experience too. If you can practice things that help your body readjust, you can take more intellectual, conceptual or creative steps to play with the weirdness of your brain.”

Loneliness often inspires bouts of horizontalism in the afflicted. In one of three large paintings, the Hollywood actor Lucy Liu, who began exhibiting her art under a pseudonym in the 90s and is now established in the art world, draws on the Japanese erotic art tradition of shunga to depict a woman’s intimate moment of bedded self-pleasure.

I lie down too (but not like that) on If I die, please delete my Soundcloud – an artwork by Natasha Matila-Smith consisting of a single bed, rumpled white linen, laptop and headphones. On the laptop, a woman bed rots in a bare room as fed-up text cycles on the screen: “Men on dating apps … I don’t care if they ski or mountain climb or go to the gym or partake in adventure sports. I just wish they had a personality.”

Tell that to Seth Brown’s Frank, a mechanical yellow mustard bottle with a real frankfurter for an arm, endlessly swiping Instagram in search of its “perfect” AI-generated bun. We’ve all been there, buddy. The intersection between technology, love and loneliness is a consistent theme.

Kayla Mattes’ seven-metre-long textile Lonely Planet, an Acca commission, was hand-woven after a breakup, on looms functionally similar to those used in medieval times. The astonishing work (which took a year to complete, including more than seven months of physical weaving) could be a 21st-century extension to the Bayeux tapestry – but instead of Normans conquering the English, it’s the internet laying waste to our hearts and minds.

It features viral memes, Yoga With Adriene, emoji reactions, the cover of the Magnetic Fields album 69 Love Songs, and an online poll: “What are you most worried about?”

“I was making Lonely Planet as more and more ridiculous, horrible things were happening in America,” says the LA-based artist. “I was thinking about that as a heartbreak, for the state of the world. There’s a loneliness within doomscrolling.”

Amid the gloom, connection emerges as the obvious antidote. The exhibition’s most hopeful work comes from its youngest artist, the 26-year-old Melissa Nguyen, who is based in Melbourne. Another Acca commission, A letter to my mother; A letter to your mother, comprises three towering, white-on-white canvasses with photographs painted in rabbit skin glue, which puckers the canvas as it dries, catches the light, and makes the almost imperceptible images visible. The works are Nguyen’s attempt to learn about her mother Trinh’s flight from the Vietnam war as a child.

One image comes from the only photograph of Trinh from the time, taken when she was about 12 years old at Indonesia’s Galang Island refugee camp. Trinh didn’t see her own parents for 14 years, and felt a gulf opening between her and Nguyen when her daughter moved from their home in Adelaide to Melbourne.

A letter exchange changed everything.

“I knew she was lonely but she never shared it,” says Trinh, who says she struggled to talk to her artist daughter about their emotions. “I told her about everything I went through [as a refugee]. I never thought she’d share all her feelings with me.”