If you’re anything like Anakin Skywalker, you won’t like the immense new work of art being exhibited at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona). The site-specific installation is taking over the gallery’s former library space, with a massive sand sculpture evoking the aftermath of a disaster site.
French artist and stage director Theo Mercier is bringing it to life, and will construct the installation in situ with Tasmanian sand, sourced from a local quarry, and water. Named Dark Tourism, the piece was commissioned by Mona and will be Mercier’s first exhibited in Australia. It takes its name from the practice of dark tourism, whereith visitors seeking out historic sites and places associated with death and suffering: such as Pompeii, Auschwitz, the Cambodian killing fields, New York’s Ground Zero and Port Arthur in Tasmania.
Dark Tourism also draws attention to the ongoing climate crisis, humanity’s negative effects on the environment, and how they’ll these issues will come back to haunt us in devastating ways. The sand sculpture will depict a landscape strewn with debris after a natural disaster – perhaps a landslide, hurricane or tsunami. As with Mercier’s previous installations (like Gut City Punch at the Prague Quadrennial 2023 and Outremonde: The Sleeping Chapter at the Conciergerie in Paris in 2022), expect to find intricate details within the work’s massive scale.
“Faced with this frozen landscape, humans find themselves at the heart of the devastation, as spectators and consumers,” the artist says in a statement. “There’s something contradictory about this project, something romantic and utopian at the same time. Because the sand allows the world to tremble and shuffle itself in infinite figures.”
Dark Tourism will run be on display at the Museum of Old and New Art from February 15, 2025 to February 16, 2026.
