Dark Mofo Cancels 2024 Festival
Just two facets of the popular event have been salvaged: the Winter Feast and the Nude Solstice Swim.
Dark Mofo 2018 Nude Solstice Swim. Courtesy Dark Mofo, Hobart. Photo: Dark Mofo/Rémi Chauvin.
Organisers described it as 'a pause', 'a period of renewal', and 'a fallow year'. Whichever way you look at it, popular Australian arts festival Dark Mofo will not be taking place in 2024.
'Despite achieving record attendances and box office results this year, it is essential for organisers to take stock of changing conditions and rising costs in order to reset the festival for the future,' Dark Mofo said in a statement.
Inflation appears to have played a part in the decision to cancel next year's event. A spokesperson for Dark Mofo told Ocula Magazine that 'factors impacting our situation include a lack of suitable venues, the costs of flights and accommodation, goods and services and related factors such as the cost of freight.'
'While this was a tough decision, it ensures we move forward in a viable manner,' said Dark Mofo's new Artistic Director, Chris Twite, who took over from Leigh Carmichael following the event's tenth edition in June.
'The fallow year will enable us to secure the future of Dark Mofo and its return at full force in 2025,' he said.
Dark Mofo was cancelled in 2020 due to the pandemic. In 2021, it was subject to protests and boycotts over the inclusion of Spanish artist Sierra Santiago's work Union Flag, which called for Indigenous people to donate their blood for use as an art material.
The event appeared to have gotten back on track by better engaging the Indigenous community in 2022, and ramping up this year with an ambitious programme that included a warehouse sleepover by musician Max Richter and a performance by Florentina Holzinger that featured motocross, woodchopping, nudity, and bodily fluids.
Over 68,000 people attended Dark Mofo in 2023. More than 101,000 tickets were sold for its various events, bringing in a total box office of more than AU $5 million.
Twite said the State Government had offered solutions to help the festival proceed in 2024 but organisers had instead opted to take 'the time and space to set the stage for another decade of darkness'.
Not all is lost. The festival will proceed with two of its signpost events.
'Tasmanians and visitors alike will still be able to meet and commune around the fires of Winter Feast and cast off the weight of another year at the Nude Solstice Swim once more,' Twite said. —[O]
