Dark Mofo Turns 10 and Hundreds Sleep Through It
Strange happenings—including sleep-ins, hallucinations, kidnappings, and controversies—helped define the renegade arts festival.
Max Richter: Sleep at Dark Mofo 2023. Photo: Rémi Chauvin, 2023. Image courtesy of Dark Mofo 2023.
At midnight inside a warehouse on Hobart's waterfront, 240 people have bedded down for SLEEP, an overnight performance by musician Max Richter.
Conceived in 2014 in protest of our increasingly online world, SLEEP 'reminds us what it is to be human,' Richter tells the audience. For the next eight hours, Richter and an ensemble will perform a 'lullaby' while the audience gets some shut eye.
Although big ticket winter festivals are now relatively common in Australia, it's easy to forget that Dark Mofo, which kicked off 10 years ago this month, helped drive cultural activity in Australia's colder months. In that time, it has garnered an international profile for bold and controversial programming.
The festival and Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), of which it is a subsidiary, has also presided over a period in which the city's population has increased over 15 per cent.
At the time, Hobart's winter economy was stagnant. Although MONA was popular in summer, 'winter visitation was dire', artistic director Leigh Carmichael told Ocula Magazine, adding that 'Dark Mofo was one of a few ideas to address this'.
Looking back, it's easy to chart Dark Mofo's meteoric rise, but for Carmichael success was never assured. He was in his mid-thirties in 2013 and didn't have much festival experience. In charge of what he describes as a 'large amount of government funding', his future was at stake if the event failed.
In its first year, Dark Mofo attracted 128,000 people. Underpinning that success was a willingness to programme difficult art such as Kurt Hentschlager's Zee (2011), an installation that creates hallucinations using stroboscopic lights, curated as part of the inaugural satellite exhibition, Beam In Thine Own Eye. Although asked to sign waivers before entering, a small number of people collapsed due to light sensitivity. The media had a field day.
Global interest in Dark Mofo peaked in 2014 when British band Coldplay asked to participate, and it might have happened had Hobart Airport been able to accommodate the aircraft carrying the band's equipment. Today, it's hard to imagine Coldplay billed alongside Norwegian black metal bands Dodheimsgard, Haunter, or seminal US punk band Black Flag.
Going forward, singular events such as ASYLUM, a 72-hour durational performance by Australian artist Mike Parr at a former asylum in New Norfolk, helped the festival cut through the everyday noise, while unpublicised happenings, such as voluntary 'kidnappings' and off-kilter midnight bus tours—curated as part of the Black List nightclub—garnered cultural cache.
The festival's penchant for risky art also exposed its audience to increasingly difficult ideas, often with unpredictable results. In 2017, the late Austrian artist Herman Nitsch, staged 150 Action, a three-hour performance featuring naked performers, crucifixes, lots of blood, and the carcass of a slaughtered cow. 150 Action drew the ire of animal rights protestors, who attempted to derail tickets sales and staged protests outside the performance.
In 2018, Parr upped the ante when he was buried in a steel box under Macquarie Street for 72 hours in Underneath the Bitumen the Artist.
After announcing that the performance was in part a 'comment on the colonial violence against Indigenous Tasmanians', he drew criticism for not consulting with the local Tasmanian Aboriginal community.
In 2021, the same lack of consultation led to the cancellation of Union Flag by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra. The artwork, which consisted of a flag which was to be stained with blood donated by First Nations people was cancelled after widespread criticism.
Up until then Carmichael said he had largely 'programmed work that I am personally interested in or intrigued by, assuming that would mean others would as well.' In the fallout surrounding Union Flag, his judgement and leadership was called into question.
As the first rays of the sun illuminate the basalt tors of kunanyi, the mountain that stands high above Hobart, Richter's score gradually wakes the audience.
Carmichael is stepping down as artistic director of Dark Mofo, handing over the reins to Chris Twite for the next three years. Despite the controversies that he and the festival have endured, SLEEP is testament to the power of provocative, unusual art to bring people together. —[O]
