Books and more books: Mona to unveil new wing

Need another excuse to visit Tasmania?

Mona founder David Walsh (right) has just come up with something. It only took him 10 years to get it done.

After four years of construction and 10 years of headaches, Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) is set to open its new wing in June, Walsh reveals.

It will feature a vast library to house his collection of rare books, maps and more, along with artworks by Anselm Kiefer, Julian Charrière and others.

"I was always all-in on books and libraries," Walsh says. "My first library card was the great leveller, the thing that gave impoverished child-me a chance to seek.’

The Phrontisterion, coined by Aristophanes in his work Clouds, for ‘a thinkery’, in which he ridicules the self-certainty of the educated, will draw from Walsh’s collection of "a big bunch of books".

Mona’s librarian Mary Lijnzaad said: "If you want to know what David is really like, browse his bookshelves."

Phrontisterion is connected to Mona’s existing buildings via tunnels in the sandstone and located in the space beneath the inverted-ziggurat levels of Elektra (above), an Anselm Kiefer amphitheatre, first built at Kiefer’s studio at La Ribaute in Barjac, southern France, with sculptures and paintings by the artist installed throughout.

The new wing will accommodate Breathe, a permanent installation by Julian Charrière, whose solo exhibition Hard Core will reside at Mona from June 6, 2026 to April 5, 2027. The installation invites visitors to breathe air that has never been breathed before.

The opening of the new wing also coincides with the return of Ryoji Ikeda’s light tower, spectra, and the Mona debut of In Absence, an architectural installation created by Kokatha/nukunu artist Yhonnie Scarce and Melbourne architects Aaron Roberts and Kim Bridgland for the 2019 NGV Architecture Commission.

The 9-metre-high timber tower takes inspiration from traditional eel traps and is adorned with 1,400 hand-blown, black glass murnong, or daisy yams.

See mona.net.au

Images: Supplied by Mona

Hard Core: Mona unveils a new headliner

French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière has been chosen as the next headliner at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Hobart. 

Charrière will present his first solo exhibition in Australia in Tasmania from June 6, 2026, to March 29, 2027.

Opening in time for mid-winter festival Dark Mofo (June 11-22), his Hard Core will feature an assemblage of artworks from sculpture and installation to film and photography that bridge nature, science, history, industry and myth.

‘Ideas burst from Julian Charrière (below) like licks from an over-friendly dog," says Mona’s founder, David Walsh. 

"Sometimes it’s a lot - attending one of Julian’s exhibitions can be overwhelming. But Julian isn’t a meddler. His ideas are deep and incisive, the sort of ideas that expose the soft white underbelly of reality." 

Hard Core will transform Mona’s touring galleries and spill out into the Void and newly excavated additions to the museum. 

It will feature sculptures made of coal, lava, molten computers, onyx and obsidian.

Cored samples taken from glacial erratic boulders are repaired with steel, aluminium, brass and silver. A lump of stromatolite rock, hundreds of millions of years old, is slowly polished to a perfect sphere between lapidary rock grinders. 

There are plants preserved cryogenically, snails slurping the calcium carbonate from marble statues, and a vending machine full of fossilised ammonites.

So, all very Mona. 

In photographs and video installations, Charrière pits human action against ideas of nature’s grandeur and vulnerability. 

With Breathe, a permanent installation commissioned especially for Mona and built into the museum’s foundations, Charrière releases oxygen molecules that have been trapped inside banded iron ore formations since the Great Oxidation Event some 2.4 billion years ago. 

Visitors are invited to inhale this ancient air, which has been lodged in rock over the years, 

Mona’s director for curatorial affairs, Jarrod Rawlins, said: ‘We like beautiful adventures, physically, emotionally and philosophically, and Breathe delivers that from every angle.’

Berlin-based Charrière has exhibited widely, but this is his first solo exhibition in Oceania.

‘What’s special about this show is how it coalesces distinct works into a single geological body, compressing planetary timescales into a shared, stratigraphic architecture and encounter," the artist says. 

" Here, Mona acts as both figurative and literal bedrock - a boundary-pushing museum which, carved from sandstone, situates human civilization within a far older story; a story of stone and bone.

‘Tasmania, too, is integral to the temporal dissonance of Hard Core: a primeval, almost Gondwanan place, where exhibiting feels less like placing works in a museum and more like returning them to the planetary condition to which they already belong.’ 

A full-colour exhibition catalogue including installation photography will be published later this year.

* Charrière has exhibited at many of the world’s major art institutions, including solo shows at Museum Tinguely in Switzerland, Palais de Tokyo in France, and SFMoMA in the US.