Namedropping

Mona’s brief was to craft an experience that pushed the boundaries of exhibition design, yet stayed true to Mona’s distinctive dark style and approach. The brief proposed, "What makes the big names big: Porsche, Picasso or Pompidou? What is the nature of status, why is it useful? Is it just culture, or is there something deeper?” Namedropping crossed cultures and eras, juxtaposed artworks, and delivered a serious message, without feeling serious. The key challenge for AP's team was knowing when to stop: to play boldly with the ideas and create an immersively sumptuous space, yet have reverence for the artworks.

Art Processors’ design strategy used contradiction and excess to deliberately unsettle visitors’ expectations, leading them to think critically about how status operates. It was big, showy and unapologetic, a mashup of materials, elements and styles, combining the banal and the extraordinary: David Bowie’s Starman lyrics, a Mercedes Benz-shaped Ghanaian, with the ancient Egyptian coffin of Ankh-pefy-hery. Repeated elements created visual links between galleries; glimpses invited curiosity. Art Processors meticulously tested the visitor journey to ensure the design worked, creating 3D models, that evolved iteratively, allowing the curators to see the design as a visitor would, and make adjustments before construction.

Namedropping set new standards in Australian exhibition design, exemplifying a high level of design skill and sophistication in converting abstract thinking about status into a highly resolved and dynamic spatial experience for visitors. Through audacious colour, sumptuous and surprising materials, and a clever deployment of patterns and symbols, visitors connected strongly with the exhibition's themes and questions. At the same time, the exhibition design elevated the status of the Mona brand, amplifying Mona's strong, often provocative, and self-aware persona. Namedropping was Mona’s most visited exhibition post-Covid, with over 200,000 visitors during its 10-month showing, and the exhibition gained critical acclaim.

Leading from Mona's ‘more is more’ philosophy, the design created a series of spaces that were intentionally oppositional and located artworks in unpredictable ways; a counterpoint to the restrained minimalism that has long dominated gallery design. Namedropping was a boldly expressive journey where visitors passed through spaces showcasing creativity and art as powerful status amplifiers themselves. Clever design devices subverted museum conventions and included visitors directly in the gameplay. Visitors bid to have their names on the gallery walls via interactive LED banners, upending art world sycophancy. Here, for a few bucks, anyone could use Apple Pay for instant recognition. A garage door revealed a pine-lined ‘man cave’ with poker table, Hendrix record, signed cricket bat and other idiosyncratic David Walsh memorabilia. David said, 'Mona is my hotted-up Torana', and so the show begins with a pristine 1977 Holden Torana SLR 5000 A9X Sedan. A red gloss room took its cue from Mona’s iconic Fat Car by Erwin Wurm, along with a richly-hued space displaying He Xiangyu’s lifesize, hand-stitched leather tank against monogrammed wallpaper, and a gleaming stainless steel cube with rubber flooring, which riffed on the gym and our quest for physical attractiveness as a measure of status.