Melbourne is awash with tennis balls and not just because of the Australian Open. Across the Yarra, inside the National Gallery of Victoria, there are precisely 8,510 tennis balls – neat rows of fluoro yellow lining a pristine white room. It looks like a sneaker shop but it smells oddly like a new car. This is the Melbourne Tennis Ball Exchange, an artwork by British artist David Shrigley, where you can take a new tennis ball and leave behind an old manky one. Especially if it is an old manky ball – and not an apple, which one person in London tried to leave behind when Shrigley first staged the Exchange in 2021.
“That’s just pretentious,” the artist scoffs. “And someone else brought in a really big tennis ball. Everybody wants to do something different, don’t they? Mainly, people just wrote swear words on them.”
