Featured Events in Melbourne in March, 2025 (November Updated)

"Making Memoir of a Snail" at ACMI is an exhibition showcasing the intricate world of Adam Elliot's stop-motion film, Memoir of a Snail. It features handmade sets, props, and characters, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the film's creation, with no CGI used. The exhibition allows visitors to explore the film's iconic Melbourne locations, like Brunswick Street and Luna Park, and delve into the lives of the characters, including Grace and Pinky.

Celebrating the work of the Australian-born Paris-based fashion designer, this major new exhibition is the largest of Martin Grant’s career. Drawn from the NGV collection, including many works donated by the designer from his own personal archive as well as loans from his family and friends, Martin Grant encompasses more than four decades of the designer’s career. Beginning in the mid-1980s in Melbourne, the exhibition continues through the early 1990s when Grant re-established his eponymous label in Paris, and extends to his most recent collections. Throughout his illustrious career, Martin Grant’s clients have included his muses Cate Blanchett and Lee Radziwill, as well as Naomi Campbell, Juliette Binoche, Rebel Wilson, and Lady Gaga. Conceived in close collaboration with the designer, the exhibition reflects Grant’s design sensibility and aesthetic through fashion, photography, sketches, press clippings and runway footage.

From cattle dogs to lap dogs, divine felines to the black cats of superstition, Cats & Dogs explores humanity’s deep connection to these animals through more than 250 works of art and design. Drawn from the NGV Collection and spanning all periods and media, this exhibition of cats and dogs in art and design reveals how our domesticated companions have long been a rich source of visual imagery – from ancient history to the present day. The exhibition features works by contemporary and historical artists including Rembrandt van Rijn, Francisco de Goya, Albrecht Dürer, Pierre Bonnard, Eileen Mayo, David Hockney, Jeff Koons, Hulda Guzmán and more alongside celebrated Australian artists, including Claudia Moodoonuthi, Trevor Turbo Brown, Atong Atem, Charles Blackman, Grace Cossington Smith and Nora Heysen. Presented thematically, with dogs on one side and cats on the other, the exhibition unpacks particular behaviours, cultural symbolism and art-historical motifs. These include: working dogs and cats; mythology; religion and spirituality; and cats and dogs in popular culture. Traversing painting, prints, drawings, textiles, photography, sculpture, decorative arts and fashion, Cats & Dogs reveals the global appeal of these animals across borders and cultures, with works from Australia, Europe, Asia and North America.

From cyberpunk megacities and first knowledges to rewilded landscapes and sci fi renegades, The Future & Other Fictions showcases the people, artworks and ideas that shape tomorrow. Through more than 180 works, this immersive exhibition invites you to step into the imaginations of 19 creative visionaries from around the globe. Experience how futures are imagined and made onscreen, with artworks, sets, props, scripts, clips, costumes and original design materials on display. Explore a wealth of Afrofuturist creations, including costumes from Marvel Studios’ Black Panther: Wakanda Forever by legendary designer Ruth E. Carter. See how the cityscapes of Cyberpunk 2077, Blade Runner 2049 and The Creator were dreamed up through stunning concept art and intricate models. Enter the kaleidoscopic world of Icelandic pop goddess Björk, with masks, dresses and artworks designed for her music video ‘The Gate’. Witness the reclamation of First Nations, South Asian and Pacific futures through fashion activism and remixed rituals and mythologies

This new immersive exhibition relives the spectacular history of the Notre-Dame de Paris in an augmented takeover of the long room at Immigration Museum.

Curated by the NGV in collaboration with the artist especially for Australian audiences, the exhibition Yayoi Kusama includes many works never-before-seen by local audiences as well as a diverse display of the artist’s popular immersive rooms, including the global unveiling of the artist’s most recent immersive infinity mirror room work. Comprising more than 180 works, the exhibition is the largest ever exhibition of the artist’s work in Australia and one of the most comprehensive retrospectives of the artist ever presented globally. Featuring painting, sculpture, collage, fashion, video and installation, the exhibition reveals the astonishing breadth of Kusama’s multidisciplinary practice. Yayoi Kusama will be displayed across the entire ground floor of NGV International and extend into NGV’s public spaces and the surrounding Melbourne Arts Precinct including NGV’s iconic Waterwall, Great Hall, and Federation Court. A major highlight of the exhibition will be an impressive assembly of Kusama’s iconic immersive installations, including her infinity rooms that ingeniously use mirrors to create the visual illusion of infinite space. A new, never-before-seen kaleidoscopic infinity mirror room, currently in development especially for the exhibition, will make its global premiere in Melbourne. The exhibition also includes the Australian debut of Dancing Pumpkin, a towering 5-metre-tall bronze sculpture newly acquired by the NGV with the support of the Loti and Victor Smorgon fund. Conceived by the artist in 2020, Dancing Pumpkin takes her iconic motif into new and surprising conceptual terrain and allows audiences to walk under the towering sculpture. The exhibition also features the Australian premiere of THE HOPE OF THE POLKA DOTS BURIED IN INFINITY WILL ETERNALLY COVER THE UNIVERSE, 2019, which visually entangles viewers within 6 metre-high tentacular forms covered in yellow-and-black polka dots. A further highlight will be the presentation of Narcissus Garden, a new iteration of the installation Kusama first presented unofficially at the Venice Biennale in 1966. This installation comprises 1400 stainless silver balls, each 30cm in diameter and presented en masse as visitors enter the Gallery. The NGV will have an opportunity to acquire this work for its Collection through the 2024 Annual Appeal, which invites philanthropic donations of any size. Our public spaces will also be transformed by Kusama’s signature polka-dots, extending the sensory experience of Kusama’s work beyond the exhibition galleries to include a site-specific artwork for the NGV’s iconic Waterwall and an installation of enormous balloons that will float playfully over visitors’ heads in NGV International’s Great Hall, titled Dots Obsession.

French Impressionism is a major exhibition developed by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria. The exhibition charts the trajectory of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in late nineteenth-century France, highlighting the renowned avant-garde artists at the centre of this period of radical experimentation, who boldly rejected the artistic conventions of their time.

Explore this one-of-a-kind exhibition and journey through the evolution of the beloved book. From the artistry of book design and production to the evolution of illustration, this tour charts the history of books from the Middle Ages to modern times. World of the Book features more than 300 rare, remarkable and historically significant items from the State Collection, each with a unique story that highlights the cultural and emotional impact books have had across generations.