Dark Mofo: Program for 2025 event unveiled as festival returns after one-year hiatus

Dark Mofo is back after a one-year hiatus, as organisers lift the veil on the hotly anticipated program for the festival’s “boundary-pushing” 2025 event.

Dark Park returns for Dark Mofo 2025. Picture: Dark Mofo

Tasmania’s premier music and arts festival, Dark Mofo, will return in full bacchanalian glory this June, with a bold and “boundary-pushing” program featuring death-defying stunt drivers, a giant Maugean skate, and anti-colonial doom metal.

After the event was scaled back last year to allow the organisers to regroup and retool, Dark Mofo’s new dawn will see Hobart engulfed by sound and fury once more.

The festival’s artistic director Chris Twite, who replaced the long-serving Leigh Carmichael in 2023, said he was thrilled to bring the fully fledged Dark Mofo out of hibernation.

Ogoh-Ogoh: The Procession, Dark Mofo 2025. Picture: Dark Mofo

“Once again we will bathe the city in red, filling it with art and taking over disused and hidden spaces all across nipaluna/Hobart,” he said.

“Night Mass – the late-night labyrinth of revelry – will carve new paths through the city and a host of Australian-exclusive artists from around the world will storm our stages.

“‘It feels incredible to bring so many boundary-pushing artists to Tasmania in 2025 for the full-scale return of Dark Mofo.”

The music line-up will be headed by Beth Gibbons, the vocalist for the legendary British trip-hop trio Portishead, as well as idiosyncratic Philadelphia rapper and singer Tierra Whack.

British alt-rock stalwarts The Horrors will also appear, as will Aussie punk sophisticates Crime & the City Solution, Dead Can Dance founding member Lisa Gerrard, LA psych-folk enchantress Jessica Pratt, and renowned indie rock quartet DIIV.

And it wouldn’t be Dark Mofo without a dose of molten hot metal. Melbourne-based doom metal revolutionaries Divide and Dissolve, known for their strident stance on decolonisation, will take to the stage, while the Hymns to the Dead event at the Odeon is set to feature celebrated acts such as Baroness, Spectral Wound, Imperial Triumphant, and Clown Core.

Baroness, Dark Mofo 2025. Picture: Ebru Yildiz/ Dark Mofo

Brazilian artist Paula Garcia will perform her work, Crash Body, at the Regatta Grounds over the course of two hours, jumping behind the wheel of a car and attempting to avoid colliding with a careening stunt driver before culminating in a head-on collision.

Nonotak, a collaboration between French visual artist Noemi Schipfer and Japanese architect and musician Takami Nakamoto, will illuminate the interior of a warehouse as part of their work SORA. Lights mounted on kinetic armatures zip this way and that according to the will of an unseen wind before whipping about the space as though caught in a hurricane.

Carlos Martiel (USA), meanwhile, will present two pieces commenting on violence exacted against people of colour. He will unveil a new commission, entitled Custody, for the first time, imprisoning himself within an hourglass, inundated by the rising sands of time as they pile up on his restrained body.

Custody – Carlos Martiel, Dark Mofo 2025. Picture: Dark Mofo

As for the staples of the festival, the immensely popular Winter Feast will again be held at PW1, while the Ogoh-Ogoh procession will involve the feeding of an enormous Maugean skate created by Balinese artists.

Night Mass: God Complex will take over a new site spanning multiple blocks of the CBD on Friday and Saturday nights, with more than 100 artists and musicians to entertain revellers at the almighty party.

Large-scale public artworks will be on display at the Dark Park hub and the festival will also have a presence in Tasmania’s North and North-West for the first time.

Dream pop extraordinaires Methyl Ethel will play at Launceston’s Princess Theatre, joined by singer-songwriter Thelma Plum.

Methyl Ethel, Dark Mofo 2025. Picture: Dark Mofo

Under the Planetarium at the Hive in Ulverstone, the immersive cinematic odyssey of XYZZY by New Zealand’s Jess Johnson and US artist Simon Ward will overwhelm audiences’ senses with psychedelic explosions of noise and colour.

Dark Mofo runs from June 5-15, while the Nude Solstice Swim at Sandy Bay Beach will officially cap off the festival on June 21, the shortest day of the year.

Tickets go on sale to subscribers at 10am on Wednesday, April 9 and to the general public from midday.

Originally published as Dark Mofo: Program for 2025 event unveiled as festival returns after one-year hiatus