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Tasmania's Mona unveils new AUS$100m wing

Museum of Old and New Art opens new building

mona new wing
Elektra (detail), 2025, Anselm Kiefer

Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) has unveiled its new AUS$100m wing.

Mona's "knackered" owner David Walsh announced the opening of the new building, as well as the cost of it, in a blog post dated 19 December.


The new wing at Mona opened after four years of construction and was built primarily to house a vast new artwork by German artist Anselm Kiefer.

MONA museum-interior---corten-staircase

The artwork, Elektra, is based on a multilevel concrete amphitheatre at La Ribaute, Kiefer's studio museum in Barjac, France.

Walsh wrote in the blog post: "Our initial budget was $11 million. How hard can it be to build a building very badly? Kiefer, you see, had just piled stuff up to see what happened. We had to pile stuff up and have what happened to Kiefer happen. Which proved to be much harder.

"And then we decided to fill up all the negative space, all the space that Kiefer hadn’t used, with a library. I really fucked up the original Mona library and I wanted to get this right."

mona museum tasmania

Walsh added, "So the budget became $38 million, and then $55 million, and then $78 million. And now we’re nearing completion, it seems that the budget has grown to over $100 million. Much more than Mona. And much, much more than I can afford."

As above, Mona is also developing Walsh's "dream library", which has not been revealed yet.

Via the Art Newspaper, a Mona spokesperson said there is "nothing else to report" on the new library at this time.

Images courtesy of Mona