Dark Mofo 2025: A Crimson Pilgrimage into the Sublime and Surreal.

Each year, as Tasmania tilts toward its longest night, a crimson tide surges into Nipaluna/Hobart - a strange and glorious procession where art, ritual and revelry converge like constellations in a sky that forgets to dawn. Dark Mofo returns in 2025 not merely as a festival, but as a fever dream stitched into the landscape, where the sacred and the profane dance arm in arm through fog-choked alleys and firelit temples of sound.

From 5-15 June, with an echo reverberating on the 21st, the island will once again serve as the canvas and crucible for a festival that thrives in the liminal. Under the guidance of new Artistic Director Chris Twite, Dark Mofo 2025 unfolds like a tarot deck shuffled by divine mischief - equal parts omen, indulgence and absolution. This is not simply a program. It is a psychic expedition.

Where Flesh and Fire Meet Philosophy

In basements that whisper of buried sins and rooftops that gasp for meaning, audiences will be led through experiences that read like fables for a disenchanted age. Nathan Maynard’s "We threw them down the rocks where they had thrown the sheep" is no mere installation - it’s a reckoning. Here, flesh becomes archive, and the ghosts of cultural erasure rise in silence too loud to ignore.

Paula Garcia’s "Crash Body" unfolds as a tragic ballet between steel beasts - a mechanical courtship that culminates in violent union. It is a love story told in screams of metal, where empathy is measured in RPMs. Meanwhile, Nonotak’s "SORA" is less light installation and more celestial séance - a digital firmament where photons waltz like spirits on kinetic strings.

Carlos Martiel offers a sobering counterpoint in "Custody" - his body entombed within an hourglass, time both captor and executioner. Nearby, Ida Sophia drowns again and again, each gasp a hymn to unrequited faith. These works are not content to be seen. They must be felt - like a bruise you forget how you got.

In "La Danse Macabre", Claudia Comte choreographs a capitalist pyre - where pianists play through fire and a motocross rider defies death in looping revolt. It is capitalism's funeral dirge, set ablaze to the tune of Saint-Saëns. Nicholas Galanin’s "Neon Anthem" beckons with an elegiac glow - a place to kneel, to grieve, to scream. Paul Setúbal’s "Because the knees bend" offers no such refuge - a tight corridor of swinging force and invisible threat. Here, protest becomes a pendulum.

Sound as Sacrament

Musically, Dark Mofo 2025 resembles a volcanic dreamscape - where sound erupts in ash and awe. From the spectral sincerity of Beth Gibbons to Tierra Whack’s candy-coloured surrealism, every note is a portal. The Horrors channel garage goth incantations, while Crime and the City Solution summon noir sermons from a cracked pulpit.

At "Borderlands", Lisa Gerrard's voice ascends like smoke in a monastery, joined by Cye Wood and William Barton in a rite stitched from bone and breath. Meanwhile, "Nox Omnia", curated by Berlin Atonal, turns the Playhouse Theatre into a haunted listening chamber, where sound pours like ink into the corners of the subconscious.

Even brutality finds its hymn - Baroness’ thunderous metal becomes a rite of ecstatic purging, and Clown Core turns absurdity into operatic chaos. In the throes of divide and distortion, acts like Show Me The Body and Machine Girl blur the line between concert and conjuring.

From Mong Tong’s psychedelic folklore to Keanu Nelson’s desert-drenched storytelling, the stage becomes a map of myth - where every beat is a breadcrumb, every lyric a spell. Gut Health, Uboa, ŽIVA and The Peep Tempel together form a constellation of resistance - jagged, luminous, defiant.

Rituals of Fire, Feast and Flesh

If the artworks and concerts are the visions, the rituals are the heartbeat. The Winter Feast returns, not merely as a market but a bacchanal of warmth - a place where wine, fire and indulgence fend off the encroaching dark. It’s Persephone’s table, stocked by night.

The Ogoh-Ogoh burning is the island’s great exorcism - a communal immolation of our monsters, cast into flame with hope and malice alike. The Nude Solstice Swim, meanwhile, remains the festival’s baptismal moment - where the brave shed not just their clothes but their shame, plunging into the Derwent as if seeking absolution in water cold enough to remember ancient sins.

Beyond the Obvious - Toward the Abyss

This year, Dark Mofo stretches its shadowy tendrils beyond Hobart. Launceston and Ulverstone become outposts of the uncanny. Bank vaults echo with pulse and poetry. Deconsecrated churches become stages for secular liturgy. There is no venue too forgotten, no space too sacred.

As twilight becomes the festival’s lingua franca, the city glows red - less like a warning, more like a welcome sign for those willing to wander off-map. Dark Mofo 2025 doesn’t just invite you to watch. It dares you to feel, to kneel, to scream, to sing, to burn.

In the end, the festival is not an escape from the world, but an invocation of it - a mirror held to our faces under blood moonlight. For eleven nights and one haunting encore, Tasmania becomes the altar. The question is not whether you’ll attend.

The question is: what will you leave behind?

The solstice awaits.

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Words by AW.

Photos courtesy of MONA.