Overview
Debauched banquets from Bompas and Parr, giant industrial fire organs and all the demon purging and ceremonial death dances you could want in a festival. Now in its third year, Dark Mofo continues to evolve to be darker, weirder and wilder than before. Aligned with the winter solstice and run from June 12-22, MONA’s annual June festival celebrated the Neolithic tradition over ten hedonistic days of eclectic and unpredictable art, performance, music and happenings around Hobart, concluding with the annual nude solstice swim at dawn after the longest night in Australia— yep, people actually swim nude in the bloody freezing Derwent River.
Programming for Dark Mofo seems to be a deliberate descent from free-spirited, easily digestible art to uncontrolled, freakish insanity — from loveable Sydney fivesome The Preatures to Japanese eight-laptop conductor EYE. This year's citywide festival had thousands huddled ritualistically around fire bins in the waterfront arts precinct Dark Park, roasting giant marshmallows, chowing down on Pacha Mama wallaby burritos, Quiet Deeds Lamington Ale and Bruny Island oyster-garnished Bloody Marys at the Winter Feast and absorbing all the doom sludge metal, splintered electronic feedback ambience and Marina Abramovic performance art they could guzzle. We put our hands into mystery boxes at Hendrick's Gin's pop-up Parlour of Curiosities (which was wonderfully Sleep No More meets The Blair Witch Project), we made forcefields out of Anthony McCall's stunning Solid Light Works, avoided bodily injury by skipping Byron J Scullin and Supple Fox's Bass Bath and inhaled Aesop's olfactory soap-mist room — all while artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's beam of light towered over the city, pulsing with punter heartbeats.
And then there's the event with a safe word (it was 'bananas'). Creative team Supple Fox created the mysterious, epic Blacklist party, a heaving, nightly end-of-the-world art rave taking over Hobart Town Hall until the wee hours. While most might want to abide by the rule 'what happens at Blacklist stays at Blacklist', we can divulge that there was more revolving pink Christmas trees made out of plastic bodies, silent drag shows, star sign-based floor huddles, melancholy poetry readings, Retrosweat-style dance demonstrations, silver balloon drops and car engine bonfires than we've seen at other, less apocalyptic parties.
But the best bit about Dark Mofo? For an incredibly niche, dark and avant-garde festival that should be overwhelmingly pretentious, it's probably the most accessible and widely-attended (demographically) festival we've seen in many a day. Toddlers, nannas, teenagers, twenty-somethings, older humans; they all show up and have a grand ol' time. Maybe it's a Hobartian thing. Or maybe there's something about the end of the world that makes us lose our inhibitions and just run with it.
Images: Andy Fraser.
Words: Shannon Connellan.