Spread the love

DARK MOFO 2019 PROGRAM ANNOUNCED

WITHIN A FOREST DARK

+ Seventh annual Dark Mofo 6–23 June 2019, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

+ Tickets: www.darkmofo.net.au

+ Subscriber presale: Monday 15 April, 6pm

+ Tickets on sale: Tuesday 16 April, 12pm

+ Subscribe for news

+ IMAGES

Mona’s winter festival Dark Mofo returns for its seventh year from 6–23 June 2019, illuminating the darkest Hobart nights with a bold program of art, music, feasting and annual contemporary rituals.

Across three wintry weeks, Dark Mofo 2019 will build in intensity, offering major new art and music precincts around the city of Hobart and beyond, showcasing everything from virtual reality, radioactive art and deafening noise to experimental pop, electro-ballads, cult black metal, and a whole lot more, leading up to the solstice night, and a return to the light.

New elements of Dark Mofo this winter include branching out into new venues, including the former Forestry Tasmania building on Melville St, the Old Hobart Blood Bank & Merchant Store on Collins Street, The Old Mercury Building, plus the Old Davey St Congregational Church, plus the Regatta Grounds, Avalon Theatre, Odeon Theatre, and out on the waters of the River Derwent, with ‘Natty Waves’ setting sail as a floating natural wine and food bar, across two weekends.

Our nocturnal neighbourhood Night Mass is under new management, with UXS and Soft Centre taking office as our newly elected night-mayors, luring artists from around the world for ritualistic late-night partying on old and new grounds surrounding the Odeon Theatre, including Empress Of (HND/USA), FAKA (ZAF), IC3PEAK* (RUS), Gabber Modus Operandi* (IDN/DEU), Sampa the Great, Mall Rat, Junglepussy (USA), plus Red Bull Presents: VIA SÃO PAULO with Teto Preto*, Cashu*, Badsista* (BRA), and more.

Dark Mofo’s first week (June 6–9) launches into the June long weekend, with the four-day Dark + Dangerous Thoughts symposium examining identity politics, and major art exhibitions opening across the city, including a new Mike Parr performance work live-streamed to The Old Mercury Building, a major exhibition by Julie Gough at TMAG, Paul Yore at Black Temple Gallery, Tony Albert at Contemporary Art Tasmania, while Mona opens an exhibition by Simon Denny and feasts are hosted for Eat the Problem. Mona will also open the doors to a new subterranean tunnel leading to exhibition chambers featuring Ai Weiwei, Oliver Beer, Alfredo Jaar and Chris Townend.

Dark Mofo’s second week (June 12–16) music highlights include FKA Twigs (GBR), Nicolás Jaar* (CHL), Anna Calvi (GBR), Liminal Soundbath (Sigur Ros, ISL), Jónsi & Alex (ISL/USA), Lonnie Holley (USA), serpentwithfeet (USA) and Kelsey Lu (USA), Dirty Three, Night Mass, Natty Waves boat cruise, and the world premiere of a DarkLab commissioned performance and album release by Costume* (Adam Ouston).

Second week art highlights include a new art precinct at former Forestry Tasmania building on Melville St in Hobart’s CBD; A Forest is a group exhibition featuring Cassils (CAN), Jordan Wolfson (USA), Paul McCarthy (USA), Shilpa Gupta (IND), and Marco Fusinato, Meagan Streader, Michael Candy, Chris Henschke, Eric Demetriou, and Steven Rhall.

Saeborg (JPN) will present her cute and kinky inflatable latex-suited performances and installations at the Avalon Theatre, and more exhibitions will open around Hobart at venues including Rosny Barn, Salamanca Arts Centre and Peacock Theatre, UTAS School of Creative Arts, Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, Narryna Heritage Museum, the Regatta Grounds, and more.

Tasmania’s wintry gastronomical heart beats again as the City of Hobart Dark Mofo Winter Feast sets up the bacchanalian banquet tables at Princes Wharf and Salamanca Place, this year communing indulgently as the sun sets and the fires are lit, for eight nights across two weekends.

Dark Mofo’s third week (June 19–23) highlights include John Grant (USA), Roger Eno (GBR), Lucrecia Dalt (COL), Author + Punisher (USA), Teho Teardo and Blixa Bargeld, KiKu featuring Blixa Bargeld + Black Cracker, Augie March, and Night Mass.

Hymns to the Dead presents its annual international metal program with MYSTIFIER* (BRA), Dragged into Sunlight (GBR), Funebrarum* (USA), Heresiarch (NZL), and Zhrine (ISL).

Borderlands with Room40 gets experimental with electronica, featuring The Sheer Frost Orchestra (USA), Stephen O’Malley (USA), Joe Talia & Eiko Ishibashi (USA/JPN), Rafael Anton Irisarri (USA), Lucy Railton (GBR), and Kusum Normoyle.

Laterne by Berlin Atonal with Lucrecia Dalt (COL), LABOUR Next Time, Die Consciously (بیگانگی) (DEU), Puce Mary, Vatican Shadow, Aisha Devi ft. MFO, Marshstepper (USA), UF (Kerridge & Oake, DEU), Silvia Kastel, Second Woman (USA), and Lee Gamble.

Plus Night Mass, Winter Feast, and annual Dark Mofo contemporary rituals the Ogoh-ogoh fear purging, parade, and burning, and the Nude Solstice Swim (22 June), with more than 1000 brave souls welcoming back the light, after the longest night of the year.

Associate Artistic Director Jarrod Rawlins said: “An important point of difference for Dark Mofo is the scale and quality of its visual art program, and the reach this program has across age groups and demographics.”

“We need to create an experience of a safe but unexpected nature, something that is not designed to shock you, but is definitely designed to poke gently at your curiosity and life experiences. It is designed to make you wonder, in moments that are unfamiliar, unconventional, and unexpected, combined with moments that are simply beautiful and fun.”

Associate Creative Director Hannah Fox said: “It seems we have put together the most unlikely program we could have dreamt up—it just evolved that way. Intentionally or otherwise, the artists in our seventh festival have become connected through emerging themes of simulated, mediated and real violence, extinction and the supernatural.”

“The music program is huge and layered, reaching from subversive electronic protest music from Sao Paulo, to intricate future-gospel out of Alabama, and Blixa Bargeld returning on a standing invitation to visit the southern isle every year until he dies.”

Journey south like Blixa to Hobart for the solstice, with Dark Mofo travel partner Spirit of Tasmania offering a special fare for travel during June (bring your own car for a Dark Road trip, starting from $99 extra each way). Another option is the P&O Cruises six-night round trip from Sydney (including two festival nights docked in Hobart).

Transforming Hobart into a citywide red light district, Destination Southern Tasmania’s annual Paint the Town Red initiative encourages southern Tasmanian businesses to light up in red for the duration of Dark Mofo, with #pttr2019 prizes in the offing.

Dark Mofo is a project of Mona, supported by the State Government through Events Tasmania.

MIKE PARR | TOWARDS A BLACK SQUARE

The artist returns after what he thought would be his final performance at last year’s Dark Mofo, with a new work disorientated by Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915).

The audience will witness a live video feed of a performance featuring a blindfolded Parr in an undisclosed location, navigating a bare gallery space with brush and black paint. The location will later be revealed and open as an exhibition for a short time, before the walls are painted out and returned to their original state. The artist will then join us in conversation at the Odeon.
Commissioned by Detached Cultural Organisation, presented by DETACHED and Dark Mofo.

+ Live-stream performance: Friday 7 June, The Tunnel, The Old Mercury Building, 24 Argyle St entrance

+ Exhibition: Saturday 8–Sunday 16 June, venue to be revealed

+ Conversation: Saturday 8 June, Odeon Theatre, free by registration

JULIE GOUGH
TENSE PAST | TASMANIAN MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY

This major exhibition by Tasmanian Aboriginal artist Julie Gough questions and re-evaluates colonial history and the impact of colonisation on Tasmania’s first people—then and now. As well as including some of the best artworks from Gough’s oeuvre, Tense Past presents new and site-specific artworks that engage with artefacts from major collections from across the country. Curated by Mary Knights. Presented by Dark Mofo and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
+ Exhibition opening: Friday 7 June

+ Continues until Sunday 3 November, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

PAUL YORE | IT’S ALL WRONG BUT IT’S ALRIGHT

From the NGV, Heide, and Gertrude Contemporary to Sunday Art Fair London, Melbourne-based artist Paul Yore’s riotously colourful soft-sculptural works have ranged from subverted paper collage to hand-stitched and sequinned needlepoint tapestry, deconstructing culture and the physical extremes of art. For Dark Mofo, Yore’s new and historic works will turn DarkLab’s deconsecretaed church into a technicolour chapel of worship for Dolly Parton, Justin Bieber, and other icons of love, sex and excess.
+ Friday 7–Sunday 9 June,

+ Wednesday 12–Sunday 16 June,

+ Wednesday 19–Sunday 23 June, Black Temple Gallery (47 Davey St)

TONY ALBERT

CONFESSIONS | CONTEMPORARY ART TASMANIA

Australian mixed-media artist Tony Albert (NGV, The National 2019, Art Basel Hong Kong 2019) turns an urban conceptual eye on political, historical, and cultural Aboriginal and Australian history. Confessions is a new interactive art commission from the artist who was raised Catholic, alongside iconic works from the past decade, new commissions, and recent collaborations with the Tasmanian Aboriginal community.
+ Thursday 6 June–14 July, Contemporary Art Tasmania

SAEBORG (JPN) | AVALON THEATRE

A latex wonderland inside an old theatre, dreamt up by Japanese artist Saeborg with her self-made Kawaii kink craft. A giant pig gives birth in Pigpen to a litter of scrambling, human-sized piglets, desperate to suckle and feed. Nearby, livestock cavort around an inflatable, technicolour farmyard in Slaughterhouse-15, and act out a demented circle of life.

+ Wednesday 12–Sunday 16 June,

+ Wednesday 19–Sunday 23 June, Avalon Theatre

A FOREST | 79 MELVILLE ST

Lose yourself in a contemporary ruin of art, noise, performance, and the violent undergrowth of human nature, as Dark Mofo transforms an old building with a glass dome entrance on Melville Street into a diverse exhibition space.

+ Wednesday 12–Sunday 16 June

+ Wednesday 19–Sunday 23 June, 79 Melville St, Hobart, 5pm–10pm, $20.

MARCO FUSINATO | AETHERIC PLEXUS (THE FIELD)
An installation with a trigger sensor performing an intense assault of white light and white noise, turning the spectator into the spectacle.

JORDAN WOLFSON (USA) | REAL VIOLENCE
Hold on tight to the railing as you bear witness, via a virtual reality headset, to the artist carrying out a violent act on a New York street.

SHILPA GUPTA (IND) | FOR, IN YOUR TONGUE, I CANNOT FIT
Wander through a thicket of microphones and metal spikes, each piercing a verse whose poet was imprisoned for their words. An echoing chorus utters each of the 100 poems in turn.

MICHAEL CANDY | CRYPTID
Australian artist Michael Candy uses kinetic technologies to impart systems on ecology and society. The insect-like robot Cryptid will be creeping and clicking its way around the building.

CHRIS HENSCHKE | SONG OF THE PHENOMENA
A decommissioned particle accelerator transforms the decomposing atoms in bananas and pomegranates—naturally radioactive due to their high potassium—into sound. Developed from Henschke’s experimental work with CERN and the Large Hadron Collider.

CASSILS (CAN) | TIRESIAS
A live performance of endurance and transformation inspired by the mythological Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes who was changed from a man into a woman for seven years. The artist’s body will press up against the back of a neoclassical male torso carved from ice, which—through body heat—will slowly melt away.

CASSILS (CAN) | INEXTINGUISHABLE FIRE
A filmed performance of the artist engaged in a treacherous fire stunt: a 14-second full body burn, shot at 1000 frames per second and extended to 14 minutes of slow-motion flame. The title comes from Harun Farocki’s 1960s film about the impossibility of depicting the horror of napalm on film. Shown here on loop, Inextinguishable Fire references continuous cycles of political uprising and apathy, life and death, ignition and extinguishment.

MEAGAN STREADER | SLOW RINSE
A commissioned, immersive sculpture of electroluminescent lines manipulating, reinterpreting and extending upon the boundaries of the exhibition space.

PAUL MCCARTHY (USA) | C.S.S.C. COACH STAGE STAGE COACH VR EXPERIMENT MARY AND EVE
Take a psychosexual trip of surveillance and humiliation, courtesy of Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy (his 1995 video work Painter regularly tops the list of most hated artworks at Mona).

ERIC DEMETRIOU | BUNGHOLE
An industrial vacuum pump sucks at empty oil drums, causing them to implode at random.

STEVEN RHALL | AIR DANCER AS BLACK BODY
A jack-in-the-box burst of action, triggered by your approach. Rhall’s work confronts how non-white bodies have been used in exhibitions, museums, and Eurocentric histories of art.

THE IN BETWEEN | SALAMANCA ARTS CENTRE

A celebration of liminal spaces and the undefinable: that thing you glimpse out of the corner of your eye, the feeling you can’t quite put your finger on. Presented by Salamanca Arts Centre and Dark Mofo.

+ Opening Thursday 13 June

+ Continues Friday 14–Sunday 23 June, Salamanca Arts Centre

MICHAELA GLEAVE WITH AMANDA COLE AND WARREN ARMSTRONG | CORONAL MASS
An electrically-charged wave of sound surges through the gallery, transcribing the patterns of solar wind and the Aurora Australis.

SELENA DE CARVAHLO | BEWARE OF IMPOSTERS (THE SECRET LIFE OF FLOWERS)
Contemplate the fate of an ‘endling’ orchid, the last of its species found only in a rural Tasmanian cemetery, via an immersive sculptural installation. Entry limited to one person at a time.