Mona’s Biggest Expansion Opens With a Library, a Pyramid, and a New Way to Sort Art
Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art is opening its largest expansion to date this weekend, a new wing called Phrontisterion that pushes David Walsh’s long-running experiment in museum-making into new territory. Estimated at A$100 million ($70 million), the project is the biggest construction effort in Mona’s 15-year history and expands display space from 8,440 square meters to roughly 12,640 square meters.
The addition is more than a simple increase in gallery footage. It includes Walsh’s “dream library,” a room containing more than 50,000 books, maps, and documents, and a proprietary cataloguing system he hopes will eventually challenge the Dewey Decimal System. For Walsh, the point has always been as much about how a museum thinks as what it shows. He has said Mona was meant to “actively re-educate people about how to use a museum,” a mission that once seemed precarious enough that, in his words, there was a “very significant chance that no one cared” if it failed.
Instead, Mona has become one of Australia’s most distinctive cultural destinations, drawing visitors with its mix of contemporary art, antiquities, and permanent installations. The new wing extends that logic with works by Anselm Kiefer, Julian Charrière, Matthew Barney, Joshua Yeldham, Lucas Grogan, Rachel Marks, and Ben Jakober.
Among the most conceptually striking additions is Charrière’s “Breathe”, a permanent installation that allows visitors to inhale oxygen molecules once trapped inside iron ore formed 2.4 billion years ago during the Great Oxidation Event. Walsh has said Australia is one of the few places the work could be realized, since elsewhere the rocks would need to be imported.
Adjacent to the wing, on the edge of the River Derwent, stands “In Absence” (2019), a collaboration between Kokatha/Nukunu artist Yhonnie Scarce and the architecture studio Edition Office. The 9-meter timber pavilion is covered with more than 1,400 hand-blown glass daisy yams, a design inspired by eel traps used for thousands of years by many of the first peoples of South-Eastern Australia.
The wing also incorporates “Elektra” (2025), Anselm Kiefer’s inverted concrete pyramid, which has been on view at Mona since last December. Walsh has described Kiefer’s studio near Barjac in southern France as a place that left him “mesmerised, thrilled, excited, stupefied,” and said the reconstruction in Hobart grew from a speculative idea that eventually became real.
The name Phrontisterion comes from Ancient Greek, where Aristophanes used the word for a place of deep thinking or meditation. At Mona, that idea now takes physical form in a building that treats storage, classification, and display as part of the artwork itself.
