Namedropping

Art Processors is Mona’s exclusive experience design partner and designed its typically provocative 2024 exhibition, Namedropping. Curated around the concept of status, Namedropping asks whether signalling for status by association—with certain objects and people—is a universal human instinct. It’s bold and audacious, designed in direct contrast to typical art gallery minimalism.

Visitors bid to have their names featured on the gallery walls via interactive LED banners and encounter a garage roller door and pine-lined 'man cave' with an impeccable hotted-up 1977 Holden Torana parked next to a poker table. A red gloss room takes its cue from Mona’s iconic Fat Car, along with monogrammed wallpaper, mirrored surfaces and a stainless steel cube with rubber flooring that riffs on the role of the gym in our quest for status. The exhibition design embraces a daring mix of colour, pattern and texture to create an unapologetically bold aesthetic.

Despite this extravagant materiality, the exhibition design is sensitive to the display demands of the artworks, showing reverence and awareness of the need for restraint, creating spaces that complement the extraordinary art on display. Namedropping shows off our team’s multidimensional skills and sensitivity to the client’s brief, even the most idiosyncratic and experimental.

Art Processors’ exhibition design for Namedropping showcases our team’s showstopping spatial ability. Forget everything you know about ‘traditional’ exhibitions! Instead, we’ve created a fun, immersive experience that leaves room for audience interpretation, while still honouring featured artists and artefacts.

– Tara McDonough, Exhibition Design Director, Art Processors