HOBART.- Matthew Barney: River of Fundament combines elements of narrative sculpture, traditional cinema, live performance, storyboards and drawings to create an immersive experience. This exhibition follows the evolution of River of Fundament from its inception in 2007 through its unique presentation at MONA. Following the project's inauguration at the Haus der Kunst, Munich earlier this year, the exhibition at MONA is Matthew Barney's Australian debut in a singular national venue.

Many of the works in the exhibition took shape as a symphonic opera and are the brutally elegant distillation of an intuitive, multi-disciplinary, creative process that marks Barney's singular artistic approach. River of Fundament takes two forms: Barney's creation of the ritual through sculptures, drawings and storyboards, and the ritual made real in the form of an epic film of the same name, by Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, the artist's musical collaborator since 1996.

For the exhibition, MONA's curators worked closely with the artist to select sculptures, drawings, and Egyptian antiquities from David Walsh's collection. Barney has selected some works to be incorporated into his own installations and storyboards.

Inspiration for River of Fundament was Norman Mailer's novel, Ancient Evenings (1983), which tells in explicit detail the story of an Egyptian mythic journey from death to rebirth. The novel draws from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and is a sexually graphic, ferocious telling of the recurring rebirth of an Egyptian nobleman Menenhetet One. The novel took Mailer 10 years to write; it was panned by most critics of the day as unreadable. The New York Times writer Benjamin De Matt described it as "ludicrous blends of Mel Brooks and the Marquis de Sade," however critic Harold Bloom, reviewing the novel for the New York Review of Books, wrote that he saw the central character as a metaphor for Mailer's personaI obsessions and his dying hope for literary resurrection through the novel. This is the view that Barney highlights in his film – a reinterpretation of Mailer's mythologies th at, while described within the context of ancient Egypt, is strongly rooted in the heart of a modern American pathos.

In 2007, not long before his death, Mailer asked Barney to read the novel's first 100 pages and the project River of Fundament became the culmination of their two desires: Mailer's to redeem the novel he loved, and Barney's to portray in sculpture and ritual pageantry the post-industrial myths and mayhem of their country.

At MONA, Matthew Barney: River of Fundament is curated by the artist with David Walsh, Nicole Durling and Olivier Varenne. This exhibition premiered at Haus der Kunst, Munich, and was curated by Okwui Enwezor in collaboration with MONA.