Men and women may be recognised as equal under Australian law, but women still suffer unequal opportunity on a daily basis, a lawyer for Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) has told a court.
Mona is appealing a tribunal decision that found the museum had engaged in gender discrimination by denying men entry to its Ladies Lounge installation, created by the artist Kirsha Kaechele, who is also the wife of the museum’s owner, David Walsh.
The installation has been closed since Tasmania’s civil and administrative tribunal (Tascat) ordered in April that Mona must start admitting men after the New South Wales man Jason Lau complained when he wasn’t allowed in.
The gallery’s lawyer Catherine Scott told the supreme court the lounge was designed to promote equal opportunity and give men an experience of ongoing discrimination.
Women in Australia in 2024 were less valued and less powerful than men, less safe at home from gendered violence and paid less, she said.
“A flipped universe … it invites the participant to think about that,” Scott told the court during an appeal hearing on Tuesday.
“It’s not about bringing another group down … it’s simply ‘no you can’t come in and think about why’.”
Scott said Lau had participated in the artwork as intended, a key part of the gallery’s case before the tribunal.
Lau, who was not present in court, was represented for free by Greg Barns SC who has worked for the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Barns said there was no dispute about the discrimination faced by women but the tribunal was open to find the lounge itself was discriminatory.
An “extraordinarily articulate” Lau had told the tribunal the gallery’s goal was vague, lacked context and it was unclear how the lounge addressed equal opportunity, he said.
Barns argued the lounge’s purpose was to only reflect on historical disadvantage.
If the lounge was found to not be discriminatory it followed that you could cordon off areas “to make a point”, he said.
About 70 women in navy business attire and scarlet lipstick sashayed up Salamanca Place to Tasmania’s supreme court in Hobart on Tuesday morning to support Kaechele. The group of hip-swaying women has tripled in size since its first appearance at Tascat five months ago.
They restricted their choreography to the street outside the supreme court, after previously coming under fire from the tribunal’s deputy president Richard Grueber, who described the women’s synchronised movements during the April hearing as “inappropriate, discourteous and disrespectful, and at worst contumelious and contemptuous”.
Only about a dozen of the women, led by Kaechele, made it into the courtroom on Tuesday, where they sat in silence.
After the case made headlines, it was revealed that several of the works displayed in the Ladies Lounge attributed to Pablo Picasso were in fact fakes, painted by Kaechele herself.
After a request from the Picasso Administration in Paris, the lounge’s fake Picassos, which had been hanging in the museum’s female toilets since the tribunal’s decision, were removed.
Speaking outside the supreme court on Tuesday, the artist said she was “inspired” by the democratic and judicial process and was optimistic the appeal would ultimately be successful.
Kaechele also told media she felt eternally grateful to Lau.
“Jason Lau has been a gift from day one,” Kaechele said.
“I love Jason Lau, and he’s a lovely man … I’m indebted to him for ever.”
Lau has kept out of the public spotlight since lodging his complaint in 2023.
Speaking to the Guardian after Tuesday’s hearing, Kaechele said she had expected the Picasso works – two paintings and three ceramics – to be outed as fakes soon after the Ladies Lounge opened in 2020.
“I was looking forward to a reveal early on,” she said. “I anticipated one within two weeks … I knew there were multiple elements of the artwork that could explode, and I anticipated that the Picassos would go off quickly, and so I was prepared with my photos [depicting her creating the works, which were not published until 10 July this year]. I was so nervous but also looking forward to it. And it just didn’t happen.”
Kaechele admitted that the timing of the “Picasso bomb” – midway between the tribunal’s findings and the supreme court appeal – was less than ideal. “I would have preferred a little air, a little space between things. But when you engage life as a medium in your art, and I love art that begins in a physical space like a gallery … and then goes out and engages the world, it can engage the world in unpredictable ways, and that’s what happened.”
In her witness statement supplied to the supreme court, Kaechele described the Ladies Lounge as an installation featuring “a wall upon which hang a carefully curated selection of paintings by the world’s leading artists, including two paintings that spectacularly demonstrate Picasso’s genius”.
Acting justice Shane Marshall will deliver his decision at a later date.
