Primavera 2026 is an exhibition about loss that somehow leaves you lighter than you came. The losses it gathers are heavy ones: Stolen Generations histories, genocide, lives erased from the record. But it is grief metabolised into making, sorrow turned toward creative invention rather than frozen in time.

This alchemy holds the show together.

Primavera is the annual showcase of leading Australian artists under 35 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, this year curated by Antares Wells.

An invitation to exhibit in Primavera is often the biggest national platform of the included artists’ career to date. This year’s theme is “traces”, the material residue of the past. At the entrance each of the eight artists offers the object that sparked their work: a handwritten note, a brain-scanning device, a rock, a photograph of an empty hall.

These seemingly odd artefacts frame the whole show as a question of raw material, each pointing to something that was lost.

We need to enter the exhibition to see what was made of that loss.

Reconstruction as invitation

The work I found most immediately compelling is Linda Sok’s Deities in Temples, a suspended silk weaving that appears to be coming undone in mid-air.

Sections of weft have........

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