One of the most powerful artworks I’ve seen is on show in Tasmania

An artwork, set in the middle of a temporary exhibition at Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art, is among the most powerful I’ve seen.

It takes a moment to comprehend the scene: an artfully lit jumble of stumpy timber sleepers, freshly cut eucalypts judging by the smell, rests on the concrete floor.

Arcangelo Sassolino’s Violenza Casuale, 2008–2025.Credit: Jesse Hunniford

One of the sleepers lies in front of the pile, each end tightly strapped with a heavy-duty steel cable. A phallic black and stainless-steel hydraulic piston silently applies intense pressure to its centre. Soon, a fine, tear-sized stream of liquid bursts from the timber, contributing to a growing wetness on the ground. A crackle and groans follow, as fissures emerge along the wood, until, almost imperceptibly, the beam splits in two. My arm hairs stand on end; an uneasy shock settles in. The sculpture, if one calls it that, is exquisitely named Violenza Casuale – Italian for “casual violence.”

We live in an era familiar with violence delivered at speed, but the power here lies in the barely perceptible visible pace and shocking sounds emitted by a piece of timber being destroyed by a silent assailant; the whole thing takes about 15 minutes.

Violenza Casuale is a 20-year-old work by Arcangelo Sassolino, a major figure in contemporary art represented by Europe’s multi-site commercial gallery Galleria Continua, which also represents artists Ai Weiwei and Antony Gormley. His work has been collected by major public institutions and displayed at significant events, including multiple Venice Biennales. Sassolino has spoken about being inspired by the masters of the incredible Italian artistic traditions from which he hails.

The 58-year-old artist’s debut Australian exhibition – In the end, the beginning – consists of just five artworks. Collectively, they evoke the machismo of oil, steel, and the heavy industry of the Industrial Revolution.

In the end, the beginning (detail), 2025.Credit: Jesse Hunniford

Two of the works are static: a huge truck tyre is squeezed out of shape by a metal clamp, and a thick pane of glass, the size of a modest dining table, bowing under the weight of a large boulder specially imported for the occasion.

These feats of physics give way to two three-metre circumference wall-mounted discs, generously smeared with a viscous substance – one red, the other blue. These spin fast enough to prevent the liquid from falling off, though occasionally drips escape to the floor. The shiny substance looks like paint but is heavily pigmented industrial oil, which for me triggers slight dizziness after just a few minutes in the room.

The exhibition takes its name from one of the installations, a new work made up of a series of five water wells sitting in pitch darkness behind a glass wall. Into these, molten steel drips at hypnotic intervals, generating sparks reminiscent of a working foundry, although these sparks are artfully curated.

An earlier version debuted at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where Sassolino used fiery droplets of molten steel to evoke what he described as the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio’s 17th-century paintings, specifically The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. In this version, the chiaroscuro is certainly dramatic. While it’s difficult to imagine a saintly beheading amid the sparks, the eight-minute sequence, observed from pews placed for this purpose, is mesmerising, in the tradition of the transcendent religious artworks adorning Europe’s great cathedrals.

Arcangelo Sassolino with In the end, the beginning (2025).Credit: Jesse Hunniford

In the end, the beginning is a perfect addition to a gallery famed for its kinetic displays and its inherent subversion of the Catholic faith in which MONA founder David Walsh was raised. Sassolino’s precision engineering is 21st century, but his choice of materials and fascination with old-fashioned masculine energy are furiously at odds with a planet economically realigning around the rare earth mineral economy as it gears up for the decarbonisation revolution. Elegant as it is, the exhibition feels like one last loving look over the shoulder as we move into a future where harnessing the energy of wind and sun assures the survival of the species.

Being sensorially receptive is an essential state for visiting MONA, the privately owned art museum and collection of Tasmanian gambling millionaire Walsh. Since it opened in January 2011, it has been an undisputed curatorial game changer in the Australian art world.

MONA’s growing permanent collection and temporary displays owe more to the practices of contemporary biennales than art museums, yet its arrival freed up Australia’s public galleries to be more experimental and playful. Before MONA, they tended to be wedded to chronological white-wall exhibitions, but this unashamedly gonzo new entrant was cashed up and unconstrained by curatorial committees, boards, public funding, or the need to observe rules or regulations. Walsh led from the front, encouraging his collaborators to move fast and break things. MONA is firmly part of the art establishment now, the sum of the considerable experience Walsh and his team have amassed, and of Australian galleries having relaxed.

Crash Body by Brazilian artist Paula Garcia.Credit: Jesse Hunniford

Coinciding with the exhibition’s early June opening was Dark Mofo, David Walsh’s festival encompassing live music, the sprawling Winter Feast food market, and various indoor and outdoor art activations throughout Hobart CBD. The festival made its return this year under new artistic director Chris Twite, following a hiatus in 2024. With its music, food, numerous bars, and warming fire pits for the bundled-up crowds, Dark Mofo evokes a blokey theme park. It carries the air of a last hurrah of the heterosexual white man. In the right-on landscape of Australian arts, there’s something incredibly quaint about experiencing what feels like a Gen X fun park. Indeed, Dark Mofo offers a wondrously unique and intriguing experience, almost as if it’s an arts festival from a world that froze in 1994, upon Kurt Cobain’s death.

Unapologetically created in Walsh’s image, music headliners ranged across punk, electronica and the “extreme metal and absurdist mayhem” of US outfit Clown Core. Winter Feast is as visually arresting as its offerings are smokey and delicious, by no mistake. There is wild goat, wallaby and camel on the menu, their skeletons arranged above the grill long after the flesh has been stripped.

A free public event during opening weekend’s prime-time Saturday night was a theatrical car crash featuring two BMWs, complete with doughnuts, pungent rubber burnouts, and dazzling sound and lighting. Look out for the video. Crash Body, conceived by Brazilian artist Paula Garcia, drew thousands to the wet, windy Regatta Grounds overlooking the Derwent, framed by the Tasman Bridge. This site is also earmarked for the proposed AFL stadium, a controversial project that led to the state’s premier being ousted the day before.

Dark Mofo’s free public art program is like a biennale in style, albeit on a walkable Hobart scale. Visually, the event is connected throughout Hobart by red lights and inverted crucifixes. These deliciously symbolise the humility of St Peter, who asked to be crucified upside down to put himself beneath Jesus Christ, but are alternatively symbolic of Satanism. Choose your own adventure.

Among the legacies of David Walsh’s everyman approach to MONA is the enthusiasm with which audiences in Tasmania engage with the arts. Free events on the opening weekend were packed, many ticketed events sold out, and the general confidence of people interacting with artworks was impressive.

Nicholas Galanin’s Neon Anthem called on people to kneel on one knee and scream, a comment on the Black Lives Matter movement possibly lost in this execution, but in which nearly everyone who walked past nonetheless participated, generating waves of screams like you might hear near a roller coaster. Brigita Ozolins’ beautiful exhibition on banned books, Revolution and Silence at the State Library and Archives of Tasmania, will remain open until October. It’s a gentle meditation on social mores in stark contrast to Dark Mofo’s in-your-face headliners.

Dark Mofo’s highly sought-after Night Mass events were, once again, sold out. Thousands of revellers explored the multi-stage, all-night jamboree of music, performance art, and installations that transformed a city block into something resembling a sticky-carpet nightclub adorned with share-house decor.

I haven’t even mentioned Simon Zoric’s Coffin Rides (as it says on the tin) or the Sex + Death Day Spa installation at MONA, where a nana in a white towelling robe at the entry deadpanned options: “Do you want anal bleaching or a Brazilian?” Did I mention the 90s?

In the end, the beginning is at the Museum of Old and New Art until April 6. The writer travelled as a guest of MONA.

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