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Monash University Museum of Art

Name: Monash University Museum of Art
Address: 900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East, VIC, 3145, AU
Telephone: +61399054217
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Monash University Museum of Art

Ground Floor, Building F, Monash University Caulfield Campus. Tue–Fri 10am–5pm, Sat 12–5pm Free Entry

19/06/2026

Over the past few weeks, artist Tina Stefanou created the ‘Cosmic Trash Orchestra’ with assistance from sound engineer and musician Timothy Harvey, transforming MUMA’s Education Lab into a buzzing recording studio and orchestra pit for visiting schools.

“We are the children of sonic anarchy, turning the discarded into music. Here we play forever: moving, shaking, rattling, spilling elemental trances together. Always together… Every sound travels somewhere. For something. For someone." — Tina Stefanou

Developed to coincide with Sriwhana Spong’s solo exhibition HA HA HA and inspired by her sculptural instruments, the workshop encouraged students to transform everyday materials into unexpected musical tools, discovering the creative possibilities of sound and voice making, collaboration, and collective play.

A huge thank you to Tina Stefanou and Tim Harvey for bringing this joyful, collaborative and imaginative experience to life.

Social media handles:

Images: Tina Stefanou with Tim Harvey, Cosmic Trash Orchestra 2026. MUMA, Naarm Melbourne. MUMA Education Artist-in-Residence program supported by the Department of Education and Training, Strategic Partnership Program (SPP).

18/06/2026

💫 FINAL WEEKS Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA 💫

Mist moves through Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA as both material and metaphor. Through moving image, sound and sculpture, the exhibition explores inheritance, transmission and belonging, embracing unknowing and resisting cultural reductionism.

Closing 27 June.

Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA is presented by Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Naarm/Melbourne in partnership with Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery,Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington and supported by Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa and the Henry Moore Foundation.

Images: Installation views, Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA, Monash University Museum of Art, Naarm/Melbourne, 2026. Photo: Andrew Curtis.

11/06/2026

🎵This Saturday at MUMA join us for an afternoon of music and movement with performers Ria Soemardjo, Sekar Sari and Eka Poedijono to honour the history and legacy of the Gamelan Digul🎵

💫 Saturday 13 June, 2–4pm
MUMA
Free entry
🔗Register via link in bio

What to expect
2pm light refreshments
2.30pm performance

About the event
Drawing inspiration from the stories of Indonesian political prisoners exiled to the Boven Digul camp in Papua, the performance reflects on how artistic practice can become a vessel for memory, survival, dignity, and human connection in times of displacement and oppression.

Created from improvised materials within the isolation of the prison camp, the Gamelan Digul stands as a profound testament to cultural endurance and collective resilience. More than a musical instrument, it became a lifeline — sustaining community, spiritual strength, and a sense of humanity amidst conditions designed to sever people from their homes, histories and identities.

Through voice, rhythm, and embodied gesture, the performers respond to these histories not through reenactment, but through an act of listening and remembrance. The work invites audiences into a shared space of reflection on cultural survival and the enduring power of artistic expression to carry memory across generations and borders.

This performance honours the makers of the Gamelan Digul and their unwavering dedication to maintaining cultural connection, creative spirit, and dignity in the face of profound hardship.

Programmed in conjunction with the exhibition Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA showing now at MUMA until 27 June 2026.

Images: 1. Gamelan Digul performance 1999. 2. top left: Bapak Pontjopangrawit (and Javanese prisoners), Gamelan Digul 1926. Collection of The Music Archive of Monash University, Naarm/Melbourne. Sriwhana Spong, Ida-Ida 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Lett Thomas, Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau. Installation view, Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA, Monash University Museum of Art, Naarm/Melbourne, 2026. Photo: Andrew Curtis. Top right: Sekar Sari. Lower left: Eka Poedijono. Lower right: Ria Soemardjo

05/06/2026

🎵Join performers Ria Soemardjo, Sekar Sari and Eka Poedijono in a contemplative weaving of song, music, and movement, presented as a ceremonial response to the history and legacy of the Gamelan Digul. 🎵

💫 Saturday 13 June, 2–4pm
MUMA
Free entry
🔗Register via link in bio

Drawing inspiration from the stories of Indonesian political prisoners exiled to the Boven Digul camp in Papua, the performance reflects on how artistic practice can become a vessel for memory, survival, dignity, and human connection in times of displacement and oppression.

Created from improvised materials within the isolation of the prison camp, the Gamelan Digul stands as a profound testament to cultural endurance and collective resilience. More than a musical instrument, it became a lifeline — sustaining community, spiritual strength, and a sense of humanity amidst conditions designed to sever people from their homes, histories and identities.

Through voice, rhythm, and embodied gesture, the performers respond to these histories not through reenactment, but through an act of listening and remembrance. The work invites audiences into a shared space of reflection on cultural survival and the enduring power of artistic expression to carry memory across generations and borders.

This performance honours the makers of the Gamelan Digul and their unwavering dedication to maintaining cultural connection, creative spirit, and dignity in the face of profound hardship.

Programmed in conjunction with the exhibition Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA showing now at MUMA until 27 June 2026.

Images: top left: Bapak Pontjopangrawit (and Javanese prisoners), Gamelan Digul 1926. Collection of The Music Archive of Monash University, Naarm/Melbourne. Sriwhana Spong, Ida-Ida 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Lett Thomas, Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau. Installation view, Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA, Monash University Museum of Art, Naarm/Melbourne, 2026. Photo: Andrew Curtis. Top right: Sekar Sari. Lower left: Eka Poedijono. Lower right: Ria Soemardjo.

04/06/2026

⭐Your gift. Their vision.
Join MUMA Contemporaries.⭐

Join a network of supporters, artists, curators, academics and leading practitioners who help empower leading contemporary artists to realise ambitious new projects.

As one of Australia’s leading university art museums, we are uniquely positioned to research, commission and share challenging new work in the public realm—works that spark vital conversations, foster new knowledge, and shape the evolving landscape of Australian contemporary art.

🔗Join MUMA Contemporaries🔗

In 2026, your impact will be realised through the first major survey exhibition of the Pitcha Makin Fellas.

A leading First Nations collective, the Pitcha Makin Fellas are known for immersive installations and irreverent paintings and sculptures that speak with humour and clarity to racism, resilience and cultural strength.

For the first time in their two-decade career, the Fellas will realise an ambitious new exhibition alongside a new commission, bringing together painting, hand-carved stamps, storytelling and community collaboration.

Co-led by the Pitcha Makin Fellas and MUMA’s Curator – Indigenous, Amanda Haskard, the exhibition will reunite past and present members, present a major new body of work, and create opportunities for engagement with students, artists and communities across Victoria.

Become a MUMA Contemporary this year and have your support directly aligned with the Pitcha Makin Fellas exhibition.

27/05/2026

National Reconciliation Week, from 27 May to 3 June every year, commemorates two reconciliation milestones in our history—the successful 1967 referendum and the High Court Mabo decision.

In recognising this year’s theme ‘All in’—a call for everyone to be an active participant in reconciliation—we’re sharing Matthew Harris’s monumental suite of paintings recently acquired into the Monash University Collection.

Harris’s ‘Consigned to Oblivion’ 2023 draws on the artist’s experience of encountering ancestral remains in an overseas museum, presented within a problematic institutional framework. Acknowledging the ongoing campaign by First Nations communities for repatriation, Harris offers a reflective reclamation of this shared history with care.

Depicting museum storage with endless shelves of archival boxes, each box is rendered with layers of white ochre—often reserved for sorry business—framed in black charcoal and presented at true-to-life museum storage scale, inviting viewers to bear witness.

We’re proud to care for this work, which will enrich learning and encourage truth-telling about our shared histories for our community and all who encounter it.

❤️🖤💛
View this work in ‘Between Waves’, a NETS Victoria touring exhibition, currently showing at Mildura Arts Centre until 12 July.

Image: Matthew Harris, Consigned to Oblivion 2024, ochre and acrylic binder on linen, 198 x 167 cm per panel, Monash University Collection, Purchased 2025.

25/05/2026

✨ Dreams, medieval manuscripts and shared making with Mel Deerson in MUMA’s Education Lab 🪄

Alongside presenting her new video work Dream of the Empty Garden in Knowing Otherwise, Mel brought the research and sensibilities of her practice into MUMA’s Education Lab through the workshop Contemporary Illuminations.

Drawing on the imagery of dreams and medieval manuscripts, Mel guided hundreds of school students to combine text and image to create their own contemporary illuminations.

The workshop offered students direct insight into an artist’s way of thinking and making, as ideas moved between exhibition, studio, workshop and learning space.

We thank Mel for their generosity, and to the participating schools and students who brought the workshop to life. 💫💙

17/05/2026

Happy International Museum Day! Marking this year’s theme, Museums Uniting a Divided World, we’re spotlighting gamelan practice in Sriwhana Spong’s solo exhibition HA HA HA.

HA HA HA features Spong’s ever‑expanding personal orchestra, inspired by the Balinese gamelan—an ensemble of percussive instruments traditionally tuned to the specific pitch of the village to which it belongs—presented alongside the historic Gamelan Digul.

The Gamelan Digul is a Javanese instrument made in 1927 by Surakarta-born musician and political activist Bapak Pontjopangrawit (1893–c.1965) and fellow prisoners at the Dutch colonial camp at Tanah Merah, on the Digul River (West Irian). Constructed from materials at hand, it features food tins, old doors and animal hides. Brought to Australia by the “Digulists,” it was presented to the Museum of Victoria in 1946 and later transferred to Monash University in 1976.

In a rare activation, the Gamelan Digul was played at the opening of HA HA HA. Displayed in the MUMA gallery alongside Spong’s evolving gamelan, it underscores the enduring, collective power of this cultural practice to connect and inspire.

Visit Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA, on view at MUMA until 27 June.

Images: 1 - 7. Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA opening and performance. Photos: .art.doc (1), MUMA (4 & 5) (3, 6 & 7). 2. Gamelan Digul performance 1999

University

15/05/2026

Join us at MUMA on Thursday 21 May, 6–8pm, for the launch of Sary Zananiri's book Photographing Biblical Modernity: Frank Scholten in British Mandate Palestine (IB Tauris, 2026), with remarks from Associate Professor Michelle Antoinette and Professor Peter Sherlock. All welcome.

📖The book offers the first in-depth appraisal of the archive of Frank Scholten (1881-1942), a q***r Dutch photographer whose work in Palestine between 1921 and 1923 illuminates the intersecting dynamics of modernity, religion, colonialism and masculinity through visual culture.

Sary Zananiri is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Monash University, Naarm/Melbourne, working across scholarship and contemporary visual practice. An artist and cultural historian, his research focuses on visual culture and modern transformations of identity in the Arab World, particularly late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. His monograph Photographing Biblical Modernity: Frank Scholten in British Mandate Palestine (IB Tauris, 2026) examines religious communalism, nationalism, and q***r subjectivity through photography. He has co-edited three volumes with Karène Sanchez Summerer and exhibits widely, most recently the Liverpool Powerhouse (2026), Alta Forma (2025), the Qattan Foundation (2023) and University of Groningen Library (2023).

Images: 1. Cover 'Photographing Biblical Modernity: Frank Scholten in British Mandate Palestine'. 2. Sary Zananiri, Michelle Antoinette, Peter Sherlock.

10/05/2026

Join us for a special event this Thursday to celebrate the launch of Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA, published to accompany Spong’s solo exhibition now showing at MUMA.✨

The publication will be launched with a conversation between Sriwhana Spong and contributor to the book, Tessa Laird, moderated by MUMA Senior Curator Pip Wallis.

The exhibition catalogue features essays and poetic responses from Ariana Reines, Tessa Laird, Vera Mey, May Adadol Ingawanij and the artist, published by MUMA and Perimeter Edition. The book is edited by MUMA curators Pip Wallis and Stephanie Berlangieri and designed by Narelle Brewer for Perimeter Editions.

🎶 The event will also feature a performance of Spong’s sculptural instruments by students of the Monash University Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance. The instruments created by Spong since 2016 form an evolving personal gamelan which will be brought to life by the performance.

MUMA thanks Dr Anna McMichael and students of the Monash University Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance.

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

Address

900 Dandenong Road
Caulfield East, VIC
3145

Opening Hours

Tuesday	10am - 5pm
Wednesday	10am - 5pm
Thursday	10am - 5pm
Friday	10am - 5pm
Saturday	12pm - 5pm

Telephone

+61399054217

Website

https://www.monash.edu/muma

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