A 72-hour performance in a 19th-century mental institution will headline the 2016 Dark Mofo festival in Hobart, Tasmania, while the producer ZHU will play the festival’s opening night.
The Australian performance artist Mike Parr will be drawing for most of the 72 hours in the Willow Court’s Allonah ward, which was formerly known as the Female Maximum Security Ward for the Criminally Insane and dates back to 1827. Cost of admission is “a mirror, of any kind, to be left behind”.
The Museum of Old and New Art on Friday announced the festival’s line-up, which will also include London-based United Visual Artists and their suspended grid of pendulums; Cameron Robbins with ephemeral LED light drawings that transcribe the patterns of the wind; and Nancy Mauro-Flude performing a piece described as “thirties-era DaDa cabaret crossed with cypherpunk internet cafe”.
The Dark Mofo creative director, Leigh Carmichael, described the festival as “a strange merging of ancient ritual with contemporary culture”.
“We hope there’s an excitement about being out at night in winter in Hobart that runs deeply through the festival,” he said.
Headlining the Dark Mofo opening night party – which, festival organisers say, is “BYO glowsticks” – will be the deep house producer, ZHU. Also on Dark Mofo’s musical front will be the Songwomen of Black Arm Band, featuring the Indigenous singers Shellie Morris, Emma Donovan, Deline Briscoe and Ursula Yovich.
In A Galaxy of Suns, star constellations are transcribed into scores and sung by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Chorus, with the lead artist Michaela Gleave, composer Amanda Cole and programmer Warren Armstrong at the helm.
The festival’s film program taps into “our most primal, profane fears”, according to the festival description. Highlights include the Australian premieres of Tasmanian film-maker Sean Byrne’s The Devil’s Candy and the English director Jim Hosking’s The Greasy Strangler, which has been described as an “oasis of filth”.
The festival’s crown jewel, the Winter Feast, returns with a communal “purging of fears”: festivalgoers are to write their fears down on paper and then sacrifice them to a resident giant demon. Also back is the mass naked swim in the bracingly cold waters of Sandy Bay on the winter solstice.
Carmichael said the festival budget was now close to $9m, up from $5m in its inaugural 2009 event. “We are still exploring similar themes and ideas, so in that regard it’s more of an evolution, but I would say this iteration is by far the tightest curatorially. I guess we will see if that’s a good or a bad thing.”
