- Home »
- Media Releases »
- MONA to unveil new wing featuring David Walsh’s Dream Library
After four years of construction and ten years of headaches, Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) is set to open its new wing in June. It will feature a vast library to house David Walsh’s collection of rare books, maps and more, along with artworks by Anselm Kiefer, Julian Charrière and others.
David Walsh, Mona’s founder, said: ‘I was always all-in on books and libraries. 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 marvellous pisstake, 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. It reveals a way of treating books as curatable objects rather than conforming to a rigid Christian schema designed long before any of us were born.
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, a monumental 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.
Kiefer said: ‘I like this idea to have Barjac on the other side of the globe. It’s fantastic. It contradicts the laws of gravity.’
The new wing will accommodate Breathe, a permanent installation by Julian Charrière, whose solo exhibition Hard Core will reside at Mona from 6 June 2026 to 5 April 2027. The installation invites visitors to breathe air that has never been breathed before.
Charrière said: ‘we had to learn how to dislodge 2.4-billion-year-old oxygen from red-banded iron ore formed during the Great Oxidation Event, a technically demanding process involving years of scientific collaboration, the building of a chemical reactor, and sourcing ancient material from the Pilbara region of Western Australia, formed in Proterozoic seas during the rise of oxygen likely driven by early cyanobacteria.’
The opening of the new wing 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 nine-metre-high timber tower takes inspiration from traditional eel traps and is adorned with 1,400 hand-blown, black glass murnong, or daisy yams.
