Naarm/Melbourne, Australia: Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, one of Australia’s leading university art museums, will present Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA, the first Australian survey exhibition of London-based Balinese New Zealand filmmaker, sculptor and performance artist Sriwhana Spong, from 24 April to 28 June 2026.

Dr Rebecca Coates, Director of MUMA, said the exhibition reflects the Museum’s commitment to presenting contemporary practice that connects global histories and cultural knowledge systems.

‘Sriwhana Spong’s work offers a compelling way of thinking about belief in contemporary life and how it moves across cultures, languages and bodies. Through film, sculpture and performance, the exhibition brings together a remarkable body of work that explores forms of knowledge that sit beyond dominant Western frameworks.’

Spanning performance, film, sculpture and textile, Spong’s work asks questions of how knowledge is approached, framed and made perceptible. Drawing on her Balinese ancestry, research into medieval female mystics, and the ways spiritual thought travels through language, movement and sound, her practice engages experiential, speculative and research-based inquiry, allowing for changing perspectives and shared forms of understanding.

The exhibition is co-curated by Pip Wallis, MUMA Senior Curator and Melanie Oliver, former MUMA Senior Curator and spans over a decade of Spong’s practice, featuring twenty works across film, sculpture and textiles. Anchoring the exhibition are two major new commissions by MUMA, centred on Spong’s ongoing exploration of sound and ritual through the structure of a personal gamelan orchestra; with each instrument devoted to a different person in her life.

Joining the orchestra is a new gamelan instrument created with New Zealand instrument maker Ryan Nicol, where spinning magnets set strings into resonance, forming the sonic foundation, by composer Lachlan Anderson, for a new film work set in Dartmoor National Park, England.

Inspired by Lord Byron’s unfinished poem Don Juan (1818-1824), the film reimagines the poem’s central female figure Adaline through a contemporary lens. Using artificial intelligence to extend Byron’s fragmentary text and create the voiceover, Spong centres the character of Adaline as a guiding presence within the work, performed by psychopomp Alice Walter within Dartmoor’s windswept landscape. The work draws together choreography, sound and landscape in a meditation on mysticism, narrative transformation and the movement of knowledge across time.

Alongside the new commissions, Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA brings together earlier films, sculptures and textiles from across Spong’s career, revealing the evolution of recurring themes in her work including language, ritual, sound and the body.

Music and performance are central to the exhibition. On opening night on Thursday 23 April, 6-8pm MUMA will present a rare performance on the historic gamelan Digul, held within the Monash University Music Archive. Constructed in 1927 by Indonesian political prisoners detained in the Dutch colonial prison camp at Tanah Merah in Upper Digul, the instrument is both historically significant and extremely fragile.

The exhibition will also feature an orchestra of Spong’s instrument sculptures, which form her personal gamelan, which will be activated through performances by students from the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music at Monash University.

Pip Wallis, Senior Curator at MUMA and co-curator of the exhibition with Melanie Oliver, said the project reveals the depth and continuity of Spong’s practice.

‘HA HA HA brings together works spanning the breadth of Sriwhana Spong’s practice while introducing an ambitious new commission developed specifically for MUMA. The exhibition reveals how her practice unfolds in a nonlinear way, reframing understandings of time and human and non-human life.’

The exhibition will be accompanied by a mid-career monograph published by MUMA and Perimeter Editions featuring essays by Ariana Reines, Tessa Laird, Vera Mey, May Adadol Ingawanij and Spong. Reines and Spong will also be in conversation to launch the book at MUMA on 14 May 2026, 6-8pm.

Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA is presented by Monash University Museum of Art in partnership with Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, curated by Abby Cunane with Pip Wallis and Melanie Oliver where the exhibition will tour later in 2026.

Sriwhana Spong HA HA HA is supported by Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa and the Henry Moore Foundation.

ENDS

For media enquiries, please contact: Rhiannon Broomfield, Rhiannon.Broomfield@monash.edu, 0410 596 021

Curators
Pip Wallis and Melanie Oliver

Exhibition Details
Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA
24 April – 28 June 2026
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Opening event
Thursday 23 April, 6-8pm
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About Sriwhana Spong
Sriwhana Spong was born in Auckland in 1979. Spong studied at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2001, before completing a Master of Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. She was awarded a doctorate from the University of Auckland in 2021, with a thesis examining the practices of medieval and early modern women mystics. Spong currently lives and works in London. Several residences have shaped her practice, including the International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York; Gasworks, London; and AMANT, Siena.

Spong has presented solo exhibitions internationally, including Luzpomphia, Michael Lett, Auckland (2023), The Poem is a Temple, Western Front, Vancouver (2021), Ida-Ida, Spike Island, Bristol (2019), and A hook but no fish, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2018). Her work has been included in major group exhibitions such as the 17th Istanbul Biennial (2022), Trust and Confusion, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2022), Honestly Speaking, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (2020), and the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012). She was shortlisted for the Walters Prize in 2012 and 2019.

About Ariana Reines
Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, playwright, performer and translator whose work spans poetry, theatre, visual art and theology. Her recent books include A Sand Book (2019), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Wave of Blood (2024) and The Rose (2025). Her Obie-winning play Telephone (2009) has been staged widely alongside performances such as Divine Justice (2022), Mortal Kombat (2015) and Lorna (2013). Reines’s translations include Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl and Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare. She has held named chairs at UC Berkeley and Scripps College, CA, and since 2020 has led Invisible College.

About MUMA
Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA is one of Australia’s most respected and influential contemporary art museums. MUMA has a dynamic artistic program of commissioning, exhibitions, and publishing, and is committed to connecting art, audiences and ideas.

MUMA presents major new exhibitions annually and the artistic program is recognised for its attention to new work by Australian and international artists and its focused curatorial research projects. MUMA’s extensive touring program forms strong partnerships with significant Australian and international institutions to ensure wide audience access.

MUMA is also a leader in delivering artist-led education to early learners, school and tertiary students and educators and welcomes over 4,000 students to the Museum annually. MUMA invites leading contemporary artists to work directly with diverse student groups to develop critically important skills of creative thinking, problem-solving and visual and cultural literacy.

_{Image: Sriwhana Spong, still from AD, 2026, 16mm film transferred to digital, sound. Commissioned by Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne and Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Wellington. Image courtesy of the artist and Micheal Lett, Auckland.}