Nicole Durling on Tasmania's MONA

The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania, has, since its opening in 2011, cultivated a reputation as both pilgrimage site and provocation—a privately funded institution that resists the orthodoxies of museum display while actively courting spectacle. Founded by the professional gambler and collector David Walsh, MONA draws on a deep and idiosyncratic collection spanning antiquities to contemporary art, staged within a subterranean architectural complex carved into the Derwent River’s sandstone escarpment.

Alongside its exhibition programme—comprising collection displays and ambitious solo projects by artists including Marina Abramović, Gilbert & George, and, more recently, Cameron Robbins—the museum extends its cultural reach through two seasonal festivals: Mona Foma (MOFO), a summer event long associated with musician Brian Ritchie, and Dark Mofo, its winter counterpart. The latter, with its emphasis on ritual, nocturne, and sensory immersion, has become a defining feature of Tasmania’s cultural calendar, positioning MONA as both institution and atmosphere. Across these platforms, the museum sustains an ethos that is frequently described as anti-establishment, though it is perhaps more precisely understood as a calculated resistance to institutional convention.

This sensibility finds concentrated expression in exhibitions such as On the Origin of Art (2016–17), a sprawling group show that reframed artistic production through evolutionary biology rather than art history. Drawing on works from MONA’s collection alongside loans and new commissions—including contributions by artists such as Mat Collishaw—the exhibition was co-curated with four prominent theorists (Steven Pinker, Brian Boyd, Geoffrey Miller, and Mark Changizi), each advancing distinct hypotheses about the adaptive functions of art. As senior curator Nicole Durling described it, the project proposed a deliberately disorienting premise: to consider art not as a cultural refinement, but as a biological imperative.

Durling, who joined MONA in its formative phase prior to opening, has been central to shaping the museum’s curatorial language—one that privileges instinct, interdisciplinarity, and a degree of productive irreverence. In the following conversation, she reflects on MONA’s development, its collaborative ethos, and the evolving logic underpinning its exhibitions.

AD: You have been with the museum almost from the start. Could you tell me about the early days?

ND: It was an interesting process to say the least: going through the development of the museum when it was all very much theoretical, and then, after it opened in 2011, actually being part of it in operation. Before we opened, it was very much about establishing who we were and what we wanted to present. It was a lot about juggling the unknown. I certainly didn’t have preconceived ideas about what we should be or how we were going to come into being. Part of the development process was to travel and research to see what other museums were doing, or to explore what we found interesting, or not interesting.

AD: Was there anything that you remember being particularly influenced by, in terms of what other museums were doing?

ND: There wasn’t one thing, but there were parts of many museums, galleries and artist-run spaces that influenced our direction. There were certain idiosyncratic museums that are still influential to this day, like Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, which is still one of my favourite spaces and collections. I love going to those types of museums: those very small spaces where you can really get immersed in another world of somebody else’s making. There is something slightly strange yet humbling about being allowed into that. MONA and, to use it as an example, Sir John Soane’s Museum, are two very different sorts of aesthetic spaces. But I suppose that is what I was drawn to, and what I wanted to flesh out: this idea of being a part of something very generous, but with its own distinct personality.

AD: Could you describe any other influences on the museum’s direction?

ND: We took our influences then, and still do, from a really broad range of things and experiences—and not just from the arts.

An important factor for MONA is collaboration. We were a really small team right up until the opening, and we came from very varied backgrounds. My background is as a practicing artist and I certainly didn’t have, on paper, the credentials to be a part of the museum’s foundational team, but there was just something about the way we worked and collaborated together. We started with a solid knowledge base, and fleshed that out, almost instinctually. We aimed to generate something that wasn’t overthought.

AD: How would you describe the environment of working in MONA, when you first began?

ND: It was incredibly dynamic, as well as very rigorous in a kind of ad-hoc way. It was also incredibly open; definitely everything was up for grabs, and I think, in a way, that is still true for us today.

AD: Many of the exhibitions involve MONA commissioning major works by artists. One example is the exhibition with Australian artist Cameron Robbins, Field Lines (18 May–29August 2016), which involved creating seven site-specific works. There seems to be an element of wanting to push artists beyond their comfort zone.

ND: It was very exciting to see an artist like Cameron Robbins take the bit and just run with it. We want to allow artists the space to take risks and explore. That’s my job as a curator: to be mindful of that, to remove the anxieties around exploring something new, and to create a supportive environment around an artist that allows them to take those leaps. But equally, my job is also about getting an artist to stay on track and to deliver something. If it works, great; if it doesn’t, oh well—so long as we tried to push as hard as we could.

Marina Abramović b. 1946, Serbia Follow +

We want to make exhibitions that are distinct to us and hopefully allow for something unique to develop for the artist, too. Marina Abramović’s exhibition, [Private Archaeology (13 June-5 October 2015)], was very MONA and certainly [reflected] her response to us and to our collection as well. It’s really important for us to position the artist and their work within a broader narrative of what MONA is.

AD: Can you define MONA’s narrative?

ND: It’s your instinct, your gut feeling. It always puzzles me when people say to me, ‘this artist is very MONA’, or ‘I can just see this in the collection’. I understand where they are coming from, but still it’s something that I’m always questioning and second-guessing. When we do something, it’s something that I would do this year but it may not be the right thing to do next year. Because once you have explored and tested the ideas, you come out the other end and you are different and have moved on. Everything should be up for grabs. The saying ‘no idea is a bad idea’ seems apt [laughs] . . . I have had some bad ideas in my time and continue to do so.

I learn so much from working with artists: not just about each individual artist or artists collectively, but also about myself, our staff, about the way we all interact. I always feel, at the end of a project, that I have learnt something new about the world. To have the opportunity to work in a gallery or a museum or anywhere—it doesn’t matter what field you’re working in—and to be able to learn more is a pretty remarkable thing.

AD: David Walsh has said, ‘some artists can give us a glimmer of things that we usually can’t see. Mona delights in such artists.’ Can you discuss this?

ND: Yes. That quote was made in reference to Cameron Robbins. Robbins works in and with the environment: for example, he works with the earth’s magnetic anomalies, and more broadly, the outcomes generated on earth as we move around the sun. These are things we exist with every day, but we don’t think about them—even though they define who we are and how we go about doing what we do. It encourages us to be aware of what is going on around us.

David Walsh speaks about humans being self-deceiving machines. Fundamentally, every day we have to overcome the consciousness of—or our awareness that—we will die, that we are all mortal. We have to intellectually fight against that reality and it is a type of deception that keeps us going.

AD: Could you talk about the On the Origin of Art exhibition?

ND: We have been working on a form of this exhibition since the day MONA opened. Ultimately the underlying questions are the reason why the museum was built.

The exhibition’s premise is very much about understanding what art is, or why we—the global we—do what we do. Instead of using a cultural filter to make an exhibition to think about art, write about art or to look at art, we use a biological filter. We propose art as a biological adaptation, much like your thumb. Art is universal, all cultures have done it in one way or another, and arguably even animals do it, depending on what you define ‘art’ as.

For the exhibition we invited four guest curators who have not really dealt with art before in the art-curatorial sense. Their names are Steven Pinker, Mark Changizi, Brian Boyd, and Geoffrey Miller. They are all academics, and all of their professional investigations revolve around understanding or hypothesising our biological drivers. They have theories around why we do what we do, and why we have evolved to do certain things.

It’s difficult for me to deeply understand any of the dense, theoretical, scientific investigations surrounding the exhibition, but it has allowed me to look at art in a different way. It is both confronting and really inspiring to think of something you feel so familiar with in a new manner. Art is something that should always be questioned - ‘a shark that doesn’t move forward dies’, to quote Woody Allen.

Ernesto Neto b. 1964, Brazil Follow +

The exhibition breaks down a lot of cultural boundaries that exist in the art world. We do like to hide in the familiar, and there’s probably a biological reason for that. We like to move in packs and that’s how we’ve evolved: in herds. I don’t want to be overtly critical about the art world, but every now and then we should stop patting ourselves on the back and perhaps just say we’re actually not that amazing, though there are moments of inspiration. It’s something we should be a little bit more open about, in terms of how we look at things. Certainty is not something that we should be specialising in.

With On the Origin of Art, we are making a pretty bold statement and saying that culture is important, but not as important as our biological imperatives that underpin why we do what we do.

AD: You mentioned that you were a practicing artist before you began working for MONA. Do you still make art?

ND: No, I don’t still practice. I do spend quality time with my nieces and nephew, teaching them—my field was ceramics. I still have ideas, but I just felt like I’d done everything I wanted to do. I also realised I was setting myself up for a lifetime of solitude, which is not a good thing for an introvert to do. I need to push myself out of my comfort zone and get myself out of my studio nest to shake myself up a little bit.

AD: How do you think previously being a practicing artist impacts how you look at art?

ND: One of the things I cannot stop asking is ‘how did you make it?’ My brothers are engineers, so maybe it’s in my genes. Craftsmanship or technical aptitude is really amazing. But equally, the artist can be incredibly proficient, a master of what they do, but the end result might be boring. Ultimately, I couldn’t care less how remarkably engineered an object is, but it does have to possess something that makes it special beyond that.

When someone says, ‘my mum could have made that, my kids could have painted that’—well, that’s my job to understand why your mum couldn’t have made it.

AD: What’s next for Mona?

ND:

James Turrell b. 1943, United States Follow +

We’ve got lots of projects coming online, and site-specific projects under development. The Turrell wing, which is under construction, is due to be finished at the end of 2017, early 2018, so there’ll be four Turrell works in there. There is also a plan to install the Richard Wilson 20:50 (1987) installation work, which MONA has acquired.

AD: That was the first work of art I can remember seeing when I moved to London.

ND: It was mine also.

The festivals, of course, are still going strong. We have a commitment to Dark Mofo for the next four or five years, and that’s a really exciting opportunity for us to do more projects outside of the museum context.

AD: How much does the museum focus on research and writing?

ND: It’s intrinsic. The catalogues or publications that accompany any exhibitions or projects are very important. You’ll see that in the catalogue for On the Origin of Art, which is somewhere in the vicinity of 500 pages; it’s vast, with lots of beautiful pictures. Books are one of David’s biggest loves, and we will be developing a larger library over the next few years. David has been collecting books for a long time.

AD: My understanding is that at MONA, the works are completely unlabelled: there’s no text around the images.

ND: Our replacement for wall labels is software called the O, which runs off iPhones, iPads and iPods; all the interpretative material is accessible via that, and visitors are encouraged to use it upon entry to the museum.

The O works like a GPS: you walk around the museum, you refresh, it tells you where you are and what artworks are around you. You can save and retrieve your tour if you choose it to be emailed to you. It’s a great tool for art teachers. Unlike static wall labels, the audio and texts can develop across the duration of the exhibition.

AD: You have dispelled a myth I’ve heard about the museum: that there’s no text to accompany the work.

ND: We are very committed to artists and their moral rights and ensuring that they are acknowledged. Ultimately they’re the ones taking the risks, not the museum.

MONA’s all about myths. We create them a little bit ourselves. We made the museum up from scratch, so there was a process of creating personality and identity. David gives good copy, so he’s the master at it. But I think people revel in that, because we do also leave a lot of space and gaps for interpretation so people tend to fill them up. —[O]

Main image: Nicole Durling, MONA, Senior Curator. Courtesy MONA Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Photo: MONA/Rémi Chauvin.