“Wherever the might of Rome extends in the lands she has conquered, the people shall read and recite my words”. So says Ovid in the penultimate sentence of his Metamorphoses, the first-century, fifteen-book epic poem that gives Ovid’s Roman account of the creation of the universe and the history of the world up to the coronation of Julius Caesar. Today, Rome has conquered the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in A Biography of Daphne, an exhibition by Romanian curator Mihnea Mircan. The exhibition takes the eighth story of Ovid’s poem, Daphne, which tells of the young god Apollo’s forceful pursuit of his first love Daphne, daughter of the river Peneus, to provide a complex, open, and deeply ambivalent investigation of trauma and transformation in contemporary art.