The Monster Children Guide to Dark Mofo’s ART program
Dark Mofo is back with a vengeance this June in Hobart, Tasmania, with a curation of works that well and truly lives up to its reputation.
For the uninitiated, Dark Mofo is an immersive arts festival held in Hobart, Tasmania, at the southernmost edge of Australia. Born out of the broader mission of Mona (Museum Of New and Old Art), Dark Mofo aligns with the institution's commitment to quality programming yet reaches toward something even more daring, elusive, and alluring. The yearly festival coincides with the coming of the solstice and celebrates the longest nights in the deep of winter with a rigorous and challenging two week program of art, performance, music, food and fire. Where last year’s Dark Mofo was more reserved in scale, this year’s festival is expansive, and doesn’t shy away from the bold and the challenging. Led by their new artistic director, Chris Twite, the festival is more exuberant and immersive than ever.
There will be tension and it is there to be felt and absorbed, not avoided. Dark Mofo wants you to embrace the uncomfortable. Not all of the work at Dark Mofo is for everyone, but that is kind of the point. The pieces there are simultaneously difficult and captivating. Good art compels you to think, to feel something, and this year's curation of works certainly does exactly that. Though there is much more to be seen, here are a few of our motherfucking favorites.
Pictured above: Void by Joshua Serafin
Void by Joshua Serafin (7PM on the 5th, 6th, and 8th of June)
Joshua Serafin is a multi-disciplinary Filipino-born, Brussels-based artist who combines dance, performance, visual arts, and choreography. You may have seen a bit of Joshua’s performances on socials lately, but social media isn’t the real thing - it’s a shitty duplicate of a portion of the real thing. If you want to see the real thing for real, Dark Mofo is the only place to see it live in Australia. The performance centres around a ritualistic dance which combines folklore and queer ancient mythologies as a means of healing and addressing intergenerational colonial-imposed trauma. Void is a celebration of fluidity, suggesting if not insisting that heterosexuality and the binary structures that exist in our society are not the only way to be. If you are someone who likes to question global ideologies and queer politics and resonates with the theme of Otherness - and seeing as how the shitty social media duplicate was that good - then this incredible piece is well worth the watch.
Pictured above: Custody by Carlos Martiel
Custody by Carlos Martiel (7:30PM on the 14th of June)
In one of our favourite and most stirring pieces, Carlos Martiel, a Cuban-born NYC-based artist known for his unique examinations of the consequences of colonialism on race, labour, and migration, presents a new performance piece and Dark Mofo exclusive, Custody.
In Custody, Martiel will be imprisoned, naked, and knelt in an hourglass structure. For two hours, sand will be poured over his restrained body, the mounting pressure and confinement representative of the oppressive weight of racial and systemic injustice set within the context of the epidemic of wrongful death among incarcerated Black peoples. Martiel’s Custody will be a difficult, affronting thing to see, and we can’t wait.
Custody is a Dark Mofo exclusive.
Pictured above: Because the Knees Bend by Paul Setúbal
Because the Knees Bend by Paul Setúbal (Nightly 6PM-10PM)
Because the Knees Bend is a performance piece by Brazilian artist Paul Setúbal and is set to heighten the tension levels significantly at this year's Dark Mofo. Baton in hand and dressed in black, the artist paces a narrow passageway striking the walls that enclose him as the audience navigates the space. As audience members pass through the space, always safe from harm, they are confronted by a range of emotions—unease, curiosity, fear. Setúbal’s performance interrogates the mechanics of power and the ways violence shapes everyday social structures, the space that violence takes up both physically and mentally, and in striking the walls to little effect, its inability to create meaningful change.
What we find most interesting about this piece is its ability to create empathy for the artist. The frustration of violence, the futility, the fear felt by both the man with the baton and the ones who see him strike. The piece, by being centered on such a strong, masculine figure at odds with its surroundings but belittled by it - helpless, even, despite his strength and authority - unmasks the archetype to reveal its futility.
Pictured above: SORA by Nonotak
SORA by Nonotak (Daily 4PM)
For anyone who loves looking up at the night sky, this one is for you. Named and inspired by the Japanese word for sky, SORA is an immersive experience using lights to mimic hundreds of stars that are choreographed through a large-scale, immersive light and sound installation at the warehouse of MAC02. Nonotak is a collaborative installation and performance project founded by visual artist Noemi Schipfer and architect-musician Takami Nakamoto. While it is difficult to perceive the complexity of the sky, especially as it connects us to outer space, the longer we look at it, the more we tend to understand our insignificance (a good way to put problems in perspective) and connection to the far bigger picture. In an enormous dark warehouse setting, SORA uses a geometrical setup of moving lights that change directions to mimic the illusion of the wind and the rhythms of. Within a few minutes, you’ll find yourself in a contemplative and hypnotic state as you watch the beams of light shift and sway, allowing the viewer to just exist in space for a moment.
Pictured above: Quasi by Ronnie Van Hout
Quasi by Ronnie Van Hout (On Show Daily)
At first, I thought, ‘fuck this thing, nah man,’ but I came around to it, and I came around hard. Quasi, the imposing sculpture by Aotearoa-based artist Ronnie Van Hout, is about the freak, the reject, the strange outsider, and we are deliciously unsettled by it. The piece fuses the artist’s freak hand and freak facial features and is a staggering five-meters in height. It is a monstrous bit of art whose depiction is often mistaken for a Musk or Trump or a combination of the two (all the more disturbing) and we cannot look away.
Originally located on the roof of the Christchurch Art Gallery, Quasi is a nod to the deformed bellringer character, named Quasimodo, of Victor Hugo’s novel ‘The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.’ If you don’t know the story, Quasimodo was misshapen and misunderstood, yet he turned out to be a beautiful soul. Quasi caused quite the divide in New Zealand, with people either loving or hating the sculpture (to the point of petitioning to get rid of it), and yet people slowly started to come around, capturing the essence of what art is all about.
Our immediate and admittedly juvenile reaction was to laugh at its sheer size and nightmarish humanity, but the longer we looked, the more we drew from it. It is a fusing of the face - a human’s emoter, seer, taster, and the mode through which a person is recognised - and the hand - the applier of intent, the operator, the means of action. Normally, the two are separated and often act as accomplices for good or evil. Where the face says it loves you, the hand may hurt you. In this depiction, as scary and inhuman as it may be, it is perhaps the unification at last of the two representations of humanity. You must see it. You will see it. It is so large, you may not have a choice in the matter.
Pictured above: Coffin Rides by Simon Zoric
Coffin Rides by Simon Zoric (Daily at Dark Mofo between 4PM-10PM)
Ever wondered what it might be like to be dead? For our fellow gothic freaks out there, let us introduce Coffin Rides by Simon Zoric. Zoric’s works are often crude and disruptive in an attempt to satirise contemporary art, celebrity, and the white male, and this piece is no different. In an effort to understand in waking life, what it might feel like to rest in the position in the afterlife, Simon devised Coffin Rides where viewers will be able to lay inside a closed coffin and think about what they have done. Will your life flash before your eyes? Probably. Will I be doing this? I don’t want to, but I’ll do it for the art goddamit!
Strange how it might take a coffin ride for you to truly analyse your life’s choices, but this just might be the perfect opportunity to do exactly that. Get the full experience at Dark Mofo this June.
The Dark Mofo full program is available here. Get priority access to tickets by subscribing here – available at 10am, April 9th. General sale starts at 12pm.
