Festival
In its gloriously perverse programming, Hobart’s Dark Mofo has entrenched itself as a sanctuary for the weirdness of humanity. By Joseph Earp.
Dark Mofo: Hobart’s Disneyland of the dark arts
By its very design, I don’t think a festival as gloriously perverse as Dark Mofo can be summed up in a single moment. But the curtain call at Joshua Serafin’s Void, a multimedia performance art piece incorporating dance, video and a pool of black goo, came pretty close.
Serafin, who had just spent 40 minutes writhing naked onstage in tar-like mucus as it formed giant bubbles around his body, bowed and grinned. Still naked and coated in black, he took stock of the crowd before him. The first three rows of seats were the show’s “splash zone” – audience members lucky enough to be within goo distance had watched the show clad in plastic rain jackets. I sat one row behind the poncho-wearers and I admit to feeling some sadness when I realised I probably wasn’t going to get splattered.
Serafin smiled as he regarded the rain jackets. “Cute ponchos,” he said. The audience purred back at Serafin, delighted. Although Void is at its heart a show about difference, otherness, the horrors of the human body – about, y’know, goo – the vibe in the theatre was overwhelmingly upbeat.
Dark Mofo, the brainchild of Museum of Old and New Art founder David Walsh, has long been positioned as the last refuge of shock in Australia’s all-too-often bland cultural calendar. As the taxi driver who ferried me from the airport to my Hobart Airbnb reminded me, in its storied history Dark Mofo has caused outcries from a wonderfully diverse range of sources, most notably animal activist groups, Christians and Hindus. “They’ve managed to piss off everybody,” the taxi driver said, smiling benignly.
But shock for shock’s sake is cheap, and Dark Mofo wouldn’t be the remarkable and important event that it is if Walsh and co merely peddled outrage. After all, our modern moment is suffused in shock: open your phone and you can see 12 bone-rattlingly unpleasant things before breakfast. You don’t need to head to the streets of Hobart to be unsettled – the state of our world has you covered on that front.
What Dark Mofo provides is a sort of well-intentioned shock, an emphatically warm-hearted variety of perversity. Anyone can throw something unpleasant on a stage and watch audience members squirm. That’s merely cruel, a purposeless unsettling. Dark Mofo doesn’t want to tear you from comfort for no reason. Nor does it want to tear you from comfort because it hates you. In fact, quite the opposite.
From the upside-down red crosses dotting the Hobart waterfront to the pagan-inspired brutalist metal triangles spouting flames at the entrance to Dark Mofo’s beloved Winter Feast, this is a festival that loves you so much it doesn’t want you to be bored.
In my first week at the festival, I saw an elderly couple holding hands during Agenesis, a brutal noise-based soundscape that sounded like the exact midpoint between a washing machine exploding and a dirty Berlin DJ set. I saw a child skipping down the wharf during the Winter Feast, holding a camel kebab purchased from Heavy Metal Kitchen, a fast-food joint that aims to “eat the invaders”, with a menu centred on invasive species. I saw a handmade sign in the window of a Hobart home, the words “Dark Mofo” cut out of paper by a young hand. I heard the gentle, eerie sounds of folk singer Jessica Pratt, who performed a 40-minute set while almost completely motionless, pausing only to thank the audience or to draw breath.
In short: Dark Mofo felt to me like Disneyland if it was run by an interesting sort of pervert, rather than merely a corporate one.
Part of that sense of old-fashioned fun comes, I think, from the profoundly entertainment-driven nature of Dark Mofo, Mona and of Walsh himself. If Mona is defined in the popular consciousness by any of its exhibits, it’s the “poo machine”: an artificial structure designed to replicate the human bowel. Some will tell you that’s the art world gone mad, little more than bad taste money-wasting. Actually it’s a powerful way to re-experience the strange joys of things we have long taken for granted – including, yes, the simple act of going to the toilet. In this world view, art is a showground for anybody who can find it in themselves to get a thrill from watching a robot shit. Which is to say, all of us.
So it goes with Dark Mofo’s music line-up. With a wide-ranging selection of acts, from goth electro duo Cold Cave to New Zealand’s doom-laden Earth Tongue, the emphasis here is always on fun, on electricity, the thrilling release of noise. It may sound odd to call Thai psychedelic duo Mong Tong, who performed their set in the cramped confines of Altar Bar while wearing blindfolds, “crowd-pleasers”. But try arguing with that show’s beaming audience, who peppered the set with murmurs of appreciation as the pair layered staccato percussion with blasts from a plastic recorder.
Beth Gibbons of Portishead fame, perhaps the biggest drawcard on the festival line-up, found humanity in her loud, abrasive set too. Gibbons was a fitting jewel in Mofo’s thorned crown – the festival styles itself around pagan rituals, after all, and there is something medieval and witch-like about her solo work. As she wormed her way through a set that resembled a kind of summoning to the sounds of an ecstatic audience, I was reminded again of one of the core myths that Dark Mofo aims to destroy: that there is something alienating about the unusual. One of the most wonderful things about human beings is that we can find a home, and each other, anywhere. Even here, in the haunting tones of a singer who, like Dark Mofo itself, finds solidarity in the strange.
What I felt most during my time at Dark Mofo was deeply moved. I was moved by the beauty of heavy metal behemoths Baroness, who called out the “human element” of making music while taking breaks between their brutal songs; by the strange, looping textures of Australian scuzz-pop wunderkind LUCY (Cooper B. Handy). Moved even by the simple sight of a couple winding through the red-lit streets of the Feast to scrape the remains of their slow-cooked wallaby into a bin together.
It’s a hard, ugly world out there, only getting uglier. I’m glad that in the face of such horrors, we have a festival like Dark Mofo to huddle up in, warming ourselves in the glow given off by a playground erected for us perverts.
Dark Mofo continues until June 15.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 14, 2025 as "Disneyland of the dark arts".
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