The Mourning After exhibition will take place at the Design Hub in August 2025 as part of the Now or Never City of Melbourne festival

From eulogies about lost kin to more existential elegies about a loss of habit, this exhibition seeks to explore how we can connect, enhance kinship and create hope to response to the overwhelming sense of permacrisis we face today. The exhibition will seek to make sense of the micro and macro narratives of (media) mourning rituals and practices as part of a constellation of grief literacy moments.

This exhibition is part of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship which deploys ethnographic and creative practice methods to understand the role of mobile media mourning rituals as a reflection of our social, cultural, and emotional lives.

The galleries will hold space for the different journeys and moments of reflection and connection around mourning and loss—from personal to cultural, individual to social.

Works will consider various tapestries of loss—Climate resilience, Anthropocene mourning, First Nations, mourning of kin (human and more-than-human), hashtag media—and will include a constellation of grief hashtags mapped on the wall to flesh out grief literacy frameworks.

The exhibition will host a series of participatory events (workshops such as ecogrief writing, creative practice climate action and embodied emotional mapping) which will operate as invitations and encounters for the audience to explore, reflect and engage—to “think” and “feel” with.

From this exhibition, the creative practice interventions and audience engagement will be evaluated and rewritten up as incubators for action research around grief literacy and mobile media mourning. The aim is to provide a taxonomy of activities (like a guidebook of possibilities) for people to explore different types of loss and mourning in collective and action-orientated ways.

Key questions: How might we reimagine grief literacy (and our vulnerabilities) and mourning in creative, inspiring, collective ways? How can artists, designers, thinkers and activists transform the conversations we are having about grief, grief literacy and the power of mourning across human and more-than-human, macro and micro worlds into more hopeful and sustainable practices? What role does the affective witnessing of media play in this reimaging?