Emerging from its self-imposed hibernation, Dark Mofo returns in 2025, poised to reclaim its mantle as Australia’s most audacious winter festival. Like a creature stirring after a long dormancy, this year’s festival promises to reignite the cultural undercurrents that make it a beacon for the provocative, the sublime, and the unsettling. Set against the bleak midwinter of Nipaluna/Hobart, the festival’s return is more than just a continuation - it is a renewal, charged with the weight of history and the necessity of reckoning.
First to be unveiled from the forthcoming program is a new commission by Trawlwoolway artist Nathan Maynard, whose multidisciplinary practice has long unearthed the fissures in Australia’s historical narrative. His work, We threw them down the rocks where they had thrown the sheep, is a visceral and unflinching installation, set within a nondescript basement in the city’s heart. The piece confronts the legacy of cultural theft and institutional erasure with a force that refuses to be ignored.
Maynard’s work does not whisper; it bellows. Like bones unearthed from a mass grave, his installation lays bare the systematic dehumanization of First Nations ancestors whose remains, stripped of identity, linger in the archives of museums and universities - exhibited not as ancestors, but as specimens. The title itself is an inversion of colonial violence, a reference to the historical atrocities where Indigenous people were cast aside with the same ruthless indifference as livestock. It is an echo of past cruelties and a demand for contemporary justice.
The power of Maynard’s work lies in its ability to make the unseen visible, the overlooked undeniable. Just as the great Gothic cathedrals were built to inspire reverence through sheer scale, Maynard’s installation operates on a magnitude that overwhelms the senses. The weight of history is not merely conceptual here - it is tangible, pressing against the walls and thickening the air.
Maynard’s artistic trajectory has always been steeped in defiance and reclamation. His critically acclaimed play 37 tackled race, identity, and power with a sharpness that left audiences reeling. His earlier visual work, Relics Act, turned the colonial gaze back on itself by imagining the future repatriation of an Australian man of British descent - a project both satirical and deeply serious in its implications. With this new installation at Dark Mofo, he continues his unwavering excavation of memory and restitution.
Dark Mofo has long revelled in the liminal - the spaces between light and shadow, past and future, ritual and rebellion. Under the stewardship of Artistic Director Chris Twite, the festival is set to embrace its most ambitious iteration yet, spanning two feverish weeks from June 5-15 and culminating in a final, charged day on June 21. The announcement of Maynard’s work is but the first ember of what promises to be a blazing festival, one that will once again push boundaries and summon the darkness from which truths emerge.
As the full program prepares for release on April 4, the question is not whether Dark Mofo will reclaim its place as Australia’s most unrelenting cultural force - it is how deeply it will carve itself into the psyche of those who dare to bear witness.
For updates and ticket access, visit www.darkmofo.net.au
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Words by AW.
Photos courtest of Museum of Old and New Art.