The artist behind Mona’s Ladies Lounge has announced the controversial space will be moved to a new location. “It will travel,” Kirsha Kaechele said in a statement to this masthead. At present, the lounge is located in Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art and for the past six months has been the subject of a fierce legal battle over men being excluded from the space.
Kirsha Kaechele, the artist behind the Ladies Lounge, at the Supreme Court in Hobart. Credit: Jesse Hunniford Kaechele won her appeal to the Tasmania Supreme Court last month, which found excluding men from the space did not breach anti-discrimination law. Mona had been initially ordered to close the space in April following an anti-discrimination case filed by NSW man, Jason Lau.
Lau was represented pro bono by Greg Barnes who countered the museum’s claim that the space should be exempt from anti-discrimination laws by saying the lounge did not address any societal disadvantage experienced by women in any definitive or substantive way. The Ladies Lounge contains various artworks and objects, including work by Sidney Nolan and pieces of jewellery, but creator of the space Kaechele has always viewed the space as an artwork in and of itself. The Ladies Lounge at Mona.
“It is a living, evolving work of art, it may not live at Mona forever. It will travel. The Ladies Lounge could appear in any number of places – the Venice Biennale, the G5 summit, Davos.
Anywhere women need a break from men, and anywhere .