Dark Mofo is back for 2019, and the line-up is as amazing as ever. If you’ve never been, get yourself to Tasmania this June – the arts and culture festival is a must-do, featuring amazing food, epic art installations and niche-amazing music artists, all curated by Tassie’s phenomenal gallery, MONA.
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I went years ago, and some of the cool shit that went down was – a massive storage warehouse becoming converted into a sound installation where you entered wearing noise-cancelling headphones and experienced bass vibrations set to timed lights, a 1am disco filled with performance artists and weird/wonderful music acts, and a huge feast held in a hall that featured dishes I’d never even heard of before.
The full line-up for the 2019 festival will drop next week, but today we’ve been given a few key highlights that’ll no doubt excite even the least culture-keen individual.
The festival will open with an ideas symposium called Dark + Dangerous Thoughts, featuring Aussie speakers like Yumi Stynes, Nakkiah Lui, and Luke McGregor alongside international guests Jennifer Boylan, Frederic Martel, Martie Haselton, Coleman Hughes, plus more.
“This year, Dark + Dangerous Thoughts presents varied perspectives from thinkers, writers and commentators on issues of identity politics,” DDT curator Laura Kroetsch said in a press release. “In a world increasingly defined by identity politics , we will consider the merits and dangers when it comes to social group identification—be it in terms of race, gender, sex, class, adornment, and faith, and ask the question, has identity become our new religion?”
Sharon Van Etten, the musical genius behind the soundtracks for David Lynch‘s Twin Peaks revival and the eerie Netflix series The OA is coming out with her band to perform tracks from her new album, Remind Me Tomorrow.
Aussie artist Paul Yore is turning DarkLab’s deconsecrated church into a literal chapel for pop culture heroes like Dolly Parton and Justin Bieber.
Artist Mike Parr, who made headlines last year when he lived in a shipping container buried under a main road in Hobart for 3 days, is back with Towards a Black Square, a work in which he will perform a blindfolded performance in an undisclosed location with live video feed.
At MONA, the long-awaited new tunnel network will open, featuring exhibition “chambers” of new installations by Ai Weiwei, Alfredo Jaar , Oliver Beer and Chris Townend.
Kirsha Kaechele’s project Eat the Problem will see a series of immersive feasts being held, and Tasmanian Aboriginal artist Julie Gough will drop a major exhibition titled Tense Past, featuring historic works alongside new commissions, questioning and re-evaluating colonial history and the impact of colonisation on Tasmania’s first people—then and now.
The full lineup lands on April 12.
