Now in its tenth year, Dark Mofo returns to the streets, galleries, and unusual spaces in Nipaluna/Hobart for its annual festival of darkness from 8 to 22 June 2023.
The midwinter festival’s program includes public art, performance, exclusive events, new artwork commissions, and nocturnal revelry: food, music, fire, light, noise, and naked swims with Dark Park, Night Mass, the sacrificial Ogoh-Ogoh Ritual and The Purging, and the festival’s debaucherous masquerade ball.
EJ Son, Giant Teddy, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Dark Mofo, Tasmania
Joining the celebrations, a rich presentation of art explores identity, place, history, commercialism, and surveillance. At Plimsoll Gallery, Interfacial Intimacies is a series of portraits and anti-portraits confronting the tensions of our networked personalities. At the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the exhibition TWIST explores Dickensian themes relevant to Tasmania’s history, and at Dark Park, John Gerrard’s Western flag, a 10 × 10-metre digital screen simulating a flagpole, rapidly expels an endless stream of black smoke on the site of the world’s first major oil find in Spindletop, Texas, 1901. Things go from fun-sized to eerily large-scale with Jason Phu’s Without Us You Would Have Never Learnt About Love at Baha’i Centre, an installation featuring hundreds of jailbroken musical toys, forming a tragic opera about consumption and materialism inside a robotic folk shrine while at Harrington Lane EJ Son’s new commission piece, Giant Teddy, an oversized Korean pop culture-inspired teddy bear with lasers for eyes, watches you dance and transmits the footage to a separate location in Hobart. Finally, escape to the stars with United Visual Artists’ new commission, Silent Symphony, allowing audiences to explore a large-scale installation of kinetic light and sound instruments mimicking planetary orbit.
The full program can be explored online.
