IT'S COMING. DARK MOFO DIVULGES 2025 PROGRAM
DARK MOFO
2025
Dark Mofo returns to Lutruwita/Tasmania from 5–15 + 21 June 2025. Organisers today announced this year’s ambitious program of art, performance, live music and more.
The midwinter festival will showcase large scale public artworks in the Dark Park art hub and across Nipaluna/Hobart, along with annual rites such as the sprawling Night Mass parties, the bountiful Winter Feast, the cathartic Ogoh-Ogoh burning, and the cleansing Nude Solstice Swim. Dark Mofo Films also makes a comeback.
The 2025 festival is led by new Artistic Director Chris Twite.
‘Dark Mofo is back!’ he says. ‘Once again we will bathe the city in red, filling it with art and taking over disused and hidden spaces all across Nipaluna/Hobart. Night Mass—the late-night labyrinth of revelry—will carve new paths through the city and a host of Australian-exclusive artists from around the world will storm our stages.’
The festival will commandeer deconsecrated churches, rooftops, basements, bars, bank vaults and the shores of River Derwent. Dark Mofo will also stretch its tentacles to a theatre in Launceston and the planetarium in Ulverstone.
‘It feels incredible to bring so many boundary pushing artists to Tasmania in 2025 for the fullscale return of Dark Mofo,’ says Twite.
The festival features new artwork commissions from Paula Garcia and Carlos Martiel, the Australian premiere of a massive light installation from Nonotak and performances from the likes of The Horrors, Tierra Whack and Crime and the City Solution that can’t be seen anywhere else in Australia this year.
Tickets go on sale to subscribers 10am Wednesday 9 April AEST and to everyone else from noon on Wednesday 9 April AEST. Subscribe for updates at www.darkmofo.net.au.
ART + PERFORMANCE
Premiering at Dark Mofo in 2025, We threw them down the rocks where they had thrown the sheep* is a new commission by multidisciplinary Trawlwoolway artist Nathan Maynard. Locked in a nondescript basement, this ambitious work uses flesh to lay bare the legacy of cultural theft and erasure at staggering scale in a mass installation.
In Crash Body*, two cars engage in an exchange of near misses, building to a visceral head-on collision between artist Paula Garcia (BRA) and a stunt driver. Unfolding at the Regatta Grounds over two hours, a soundscape of engine growls and shearing metal will rip through the body as the impact nears. Festival-goers will encounter the aftermath at Dark Park.
Taking its name from the Japanese for ‘sky’, SORA by Nonotak (FRA)(JPN) creates a dancing, hypnotic firmament inside a cavernous warehouse. Lights on kinetic armatures spin and pulse, undulating at the whim of an invisible wind at times and raging like the apotheosis of an electrical storm at others.
Havana-born artist Carlos Martiel (USA), will present two works addressing systemic violence against people of colour. In video work Cuerpo, Martiel is held on life’s edge. In week two, he’ll debut a new commission, Custody*, in which he’s imprisoned inside an hourglass as rising sands weigh heavily on his naked and restrained body.
Similarly tense is Ida Sophia’s (AUS) video Witness, in which the artist submits to a relentless baptism—to near drowning—shaped by a childhood jealousy of her father’s religious devotion.
Claudia Comte’s (CHE) La Danse Macabre* is a blistering allegory of capitalist apathy wherein two pianists perform Saint-Saëns’ symphonic meditation on death while a wooden sculpture is consumed by flames and a motocross rider jumps through the inferno. The work will be writ large on a massive screen in Dark Park.
Visitors can take a knee—making space for mourning, protest and catharsis—in Neon Anthem* by Nicholas Galanin (USA), or navigate a tight passage as a figure clad in black swings their police baton, marking the surrounding walls with violent blows, in Because the knees bend by Paul Setúbal (BRA).
Simon Zoric’s (AUS) Coffin Rides will take you on a trip to the afterlife. Souvenir included.
Quasi*, Ronnie van Hout’s (NZL) monstrous fusion of the artist's face and hand that divided audiences in Christchurch and Wellington, will appear atop a waterfront building. Newly commissioned sculpture Chocolate Goblin* by Travis Ficarra (AUS) is an avatar made flesh, a naked, pregnant form who makes its home at the edge of desire and disgust in a church.
In VOID*, a viscous performance at the Theatre Royal by Joshua Serafin (PHL) (BEL), a genderless deity unfurls, birthing a speculative creation myth through dance, sound and ancient queer mythology.
Richard Russell’s collaborative music project Everything is Recorded will shatter the silence of the whole city with the premiere of a new improvised reflection on the winter solstice.
In a brand new Mona exhibition, in the end, the beginning, sculptor Arcangelo Sassolino (ITA) plays with fire (and other things) as he seeks to grab matter by the neck, manipulate it, make drama and inspire renewal. Also at Mona, get lost in the House of Mirrors by Christian Wagstaff (AUS) + Keith Courtney (AUS), presage disaster with Théo Mercier’s (FRA) MIRRORSCAPE, Ben Salter + Daniel Platts pamper listeners with live sounds at the Sex + Death Dayspa, and experience Paludarium HIROMI, an encapsulated ecosystem—complete with a bonsai tree endemic to Tasmania—by Azuma Makoto (JPN).
Karina Utomo’s (AUS) Mortal Voice activates extreme metal vocalisations through Javanese mythology and ancestral resonances. Voice and gesture transcend thresholds of coherence to build an immersive corporeal rupture. In week two of the festival, Utomo accompanies the work with a live performance.
Created by Ben Cannings (AUS), 1,000 Strikes is a meditation on capitalist routine, digital saturation and urban alienation atop a car park. Improvised music and movement centres around the grounding resonance of an orchestral gong, creating a ritualised interruption to the chaos of modern life.
North Hobart's State Cinema, which has been showing movies since 1913, will host the return of Dark Mofo Films with a program of eleven films. Featured in Week One are Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal, David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Mike Cheslik’s Hundreds of Beavers and The Most Australian Band Ever! by Jonathan Sequeira + The Hard Ons.
Week two adds John Hillcoat’s The Proposition, Neil Armfield’s Candy, Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Lighthouse by Robert Eggers, Wake in Fright by Ted Kotcheff, Bad Boy Bubby by Rolf de Heer and Lars von Trier’s gleeful apocalypse fantasy Melancholia.
MUSIC
Beth Gibbons (GBR) opens this year’s music program with two shows at The Odeon, 17 years after the release of her last album with iconic trip-hop act Portishead.
One of 19 Australian-exclusive music performances, Philly wordsmith Tierra Whack* (USA) sculpts surreal worlds in rap and R&B, where shifting moods spill into theatrical hooks and technicolor fantasies.
The Australian premiere of Landscape from Memory* by experimental electronic musician Rival Consoles (GBR) brings waves of euphoric synth and deep ambience.
Darkwave’s modern torchbearers Cold Cave* (USA) bring their shimmering underground synth-pop and noise, and Boy Harsher* (USA) will take us to the murky depths throbbing with desire and loneliness.
The thunderous, cathartic progressive metal of Baroness* (USA) will wash over the Odeon. Hymns to the Dead* returns for another chapter of blistering sound—uniting the furious Quebecois black metal debauchery of Spectral Wound (CAN) with New York’s dissonant avant-death miscreants Imperial Triumphant (USA), black metal makers Hulder (USA) and swamp death spectacle Slimelord (GBR). Clown Core* (USA), meanwhile, is a breakneck fusion of jazz, extreme metal and absurdist mayhem.
Zeitgeist-shaking garage goths The Horrors* (GBR) will conjure industrial mantras while art-punk progenitors Crime & the City Solution* (AUS) + (DEU) sing songs that are cinematic and lyrical. At Borderlands*, Lisa Gerrard (a founding member of Dead Can Dance), Cye Wood + William Barton proffer the first live performance of their project ‘Under In Between’—a sonic journey that resonates through blood, flesh, and bone.
From New York, the trio Show Me The Body* (USA) bring their ceremonial hardcore and banjo, while Machine Girl* (USA) will craft furious digital hardcore for the collapse of civilisation.
Surfacing from the Chicago underground, existential industrial rap duo Angry Blackmen are storytellers too, delivering American horror tales smacked over glitchy beats.
Enter a lush oblivion with American DIY indie-rockers DIIV (USA) or wade towards Mancunian saxophonist and poet Alabaster DePlume* (GBR), who transmits sonorous gems in warm waves.
Get lost in the heart-spilling sincerity of experimental outsider LUCY (Cooper B Handy)* (USA) or the dream-spun folk reveries of Jessica Pratt (USA), an LA songstress who inhabits the shadows of California's psychedelic past.
The German capital’s venerated music festival Berlin Atonal* curates new project Nox Omnia, transforming the limited capacity Playhouse Theatre into a sit-down journey of hypnagogic, experimental soundscapes.
At Federation Concert Hall, co-artistic director and conductor of the London Contemporary Orchestra, Robert Ames (GBR), curates a symphony of abstract waterscapes—melodic streams, trickling textures, currents of creation and dissolution—performed by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra (AUS).
Thaiboy Digital (THA), a member of the mythical Drain Gang, brings feverish melodies with a gritty undercurrent, while Mong Tong* (TWN) combines Southeast Asian folklore and dreamy psychedelia.
AGENESIS by Robert Curgenven + Kat McDowall (AUS + IRL) is a baptism of light—phasing audiovisual patterns that pull you into a trance, where sensory perception fractures.
Hailing from the remote community of Papunya, northwest of Alice Springs, Luritja singer-songwriter Keanu Nelson (AUS) spins revelatory audio portraits of place. The classical Hindustani vocals and fluid drones of Shackleton (GBR) + Siddhartha Belmannu (IND) tilt at transcendence.
Noisy and hypnotic Gut Health (AUS) presents dance-punk from the Naarm underground, while Forest Swords’ (GBR) form immersive electronic landscapes from the post-industrial guts of Liverpool.
Pioneering death industrial project Brighter Death Now (SWE) and experimentalist Evicshen (USA), who makes her own electronic instruments, create voids of noise with support from Tongue Dissolver (AUS).
Divide and Dissolve’s (AUS) churning riffs and crunchy feedback are paired with the catgirl death industrial of Uboa (AUS), and darkwave with a Slavic edge by ŽIVA (AUS) (HRV). Post-punk rockers The Peep Tempel (AUS) break a long hiatus with raw portraits of life in the burbs.
RITUALS
The Winter Feast warms and brightens our darkest nights, taking over Princes Wharf and Salamanca Lawns throughout the festival. This year the Feast welcomes guest chef Niyati Rao, hailing from hit Mumbai restaurant Ekaa. She will be teaming up with Chef Craig Will and fellow co-owners of Launceston’s Stillwater, Bianca and James Welsh, to create a whimsical, theatrical blending of cuisines from around the world that showcase Tasmanian ingredients. Stallholders, music, and more still to come.
Over both the festival’s Fridays and both Saturdays, congregate for Night Mass: God Complex, a shapeshifting party that secrets away over 100 artists and musicians at a whole new site spanning blocks of the CBD.
This year’s Ogoh-Ogoh ritual solicits fears to feed a giant Maugean skate—an endangered species found only in Tasmania’s Macquarie Harbour—crafted by Balinese artists. On Sunday 15 June, revelers will join a procession from Parliament Lawns to Dark Park for the totem’s fiery sacrifice, a collective catharsis in purifying flame.
The festival comes to a close with the Nude Solstice Swim, which returns to Long Beach in Sandy Bay on Saturday 21 June, the shortest day of the year.
REGIONAL
Advancing to the north of the state, this year’s festival program adds art and music events in Launceston and Ulverstone across both weeks.
Methyl Ethel (AUS) brings jangly dream pop excess to Launceston’s Princess Theatre, where Gamilaraay singer-songwriter Thelma Plum (AUS) paints in shades of raw tenderness and hard-hitting rage.
Beneath the Planetarium dome of The Hive in Ulverstone, embark on a psychedelic musical odyssey with XYZZY by Jess Johnson (NZL) + Simon Ward (USA) that features webs of flesh mandalas, self-replicating architecture, undulating worms, hallucinogenic patterns, and messianic alien deities.
+ ENDS +
Full Line Up below!
Adam HsiehAUS/CHN
BaronessUSA
CORINAUS/PHL
CanzonieriITA
Carlos MartielUSA/CUB
Clown CoreUSA
Cold CaveUSA
Cūrā8AUS
DIIVUSA
Earth TongueNZL
Garage SaleAUS
HULDERUSA
Jess JohnsonNZL
Joshua SerafinPHL/BEL
Karina UtomoAUS
Machine GirlUSA
Nathan BeardAUS
Nice HouseAUS
NonotakFRA/JPN
Passepartout DuoITA/USA
Paul SetúbalBRA
Paula GarciaBRA
PerilaDEU
PurientAUS
Shackleton + Siddhartha BelmannuGBR/IND
Simon WardNZL
Simon ZoricAUS
SlimelordGBR
Space AfrikaGBR
Spooky EyesAUS
TEENSAUS
UTAS Creative Arts and Media StudentsAUS
UboaAUS
ŽIVAAUS/HRV
