At any other time of the year, the discovery of 480 sheep heads under a Dangerfield in the Nipaluna/Hobart CBD would have Collins Street cordoned off with police tape. So too a car crash, a masked man bashing walls with a truncheon, a drag queen throwing money from a rooftop, nightclub patrons hurling tomatoes at staff, or a performer on the cusp of being lynched.

Not so at Dark Mofo, where for two weeks each winter, the city suspends its physical, moral, vegetable and sartorial standards in the name of art. In its 11th year, Mofo felt like the debut of a new variant. How could it not?

The 2023 festival was a triumphant swan song for outgoing artistic director Leigh Carmichael, who steered Dark Mofo through a decade of invention, success, controversy and the pandemic. Despite quickly appointing his replacement in Chris Twite, the festival paused for 2024, citing the need for a “period of renewal”. (Though Mona and the Winter Feast that year felt a bit like Dark Mofo anyway.) This meant Twite and team’s 2025 debut was the festival equivalent of the old IT helpdesk maxim: have you tried turning it off and on again?

It worked. Takeaways from the festival’s first five days: the music was singular and excellent, the new Mona exhibition by Italian artist Arcangelo Sassolino sublime, and late-night party Night Mass was gleefully amped up and reinvented. Cons: Dark Park continues to dim, the visual art offerings felt a little slight, and there was a nagging feeling this year’s program lacked a marquee moment.

That moment could have been Crash Body by Brazilian artist Paula Garcia, which saw Garcia and a stuntman smash two Audi TTs into each other at great velocity. Billed as a two-hour performance, I was in Dark Park on Saturday night waiting on three tacos when I got the text: “we’re expecting the crash early.” A sprint through the crowds to the Royal Hobart Regatta Grounds revealed the cars circling each other on a sliver of concrete next to the black Derwent River. As the crowd leaned in and beanie-clad children on shoulders munched hot chips, the two cars faced-off, revved engines and accelerated. No screech of brakes. Just glass shattering, metal crunching, the crowd groaning and the slick vehicles now smoking wrecks.

The stunt driver emerged first. A tense 10 minutes later, Garcia stood to cheers while clutching her chest and smiling. Perhaps that was a measure of the work, a “raw experience of violent action on the body”. It made me think of every other car crash that doesn’t end in applause, something ghoulish and wasteful to re-create. And yet … exhilarating and triumphant. A girl in the crowd who’d been in a similar accident told her friends reliving it made her feel “really alive”. Maybe that’s why Garcia looked so happy. Presumably the festival was happy, too – a photo of Garcia’s only previous performance of this crash, in a São Paulo gallery in 2020, was this year’s hero image. In tribute to the raw experience of violent action on the body, I went and celebrated with a shot of absinthe at the Winter Feast.

Night Mass has come a long way since its origins in the cupboards of The Odeon. This year the late-night party swallowed up a whole corner block in the CBD. Dubbed “God Complex” – a reference to either Mona owner David Walsh, the ex-Spotlight building it reimagined, or who you think you are after multiple absinthe shots – it offered two commandments: seek out the maze of mini-doofs and weirdo happenings, or plant yourself in one of two huge rave spaces and let it happen to you.

The big rooms were stunning: one a two-storey, cake-deck of stages, the other all tangled wires and askew screens that pulsed in concert with whoever the hell was playing down the far end. But I liked the mini bits. At the top of the building, through a fake cloak room, explorers were rewarded with a share-house party turret, complete with a DJ booth styled as a lounge room, and side rooms of beds, cushions, and clothes spilling from cupboards. Hungry? Fairy bread in the kitchen.

Elsewhere there was … a lot. Rude hand puppets, tomato throwing, a spiral slide to the dance floor, nude portraits, someone shaving eyebrows, porn videos, mirror rooms, furries dancing, some kind of shark sculpture situation. And, weaving through it all, endless, Escher-like staircases of people trying to move up, down and across it all at once. “Hell on earth,” texted a friend. Which is what I loved about it.

If Night Mass was intentionally heavy, Dark Park was light – a continued drift from the industrial location’s artistic possibilities towards being a fine food truck and bonfire spot. Maybe that’s prep for the incoming Macquarie Point Stadium, which was here behind glass in scale model form, and will soon – probably, contentiously – turn all this into a construction zone. For now, wine and cheese bars, getting your photo taken in a coffin by Melbourne artist Simon Zoric, snack plates, warding off the winter chill, and Ronnie Van Hout’s giant hand-and-face sculpture Quasi leering over it all.

The Dark Park highlight was SORA by Nonatak. Inside a warehouse, a mesmerising constellation of lights swirled in gridded formation, over synth sounds and people ignoring the usher’s pleas to not lie on the floor. Nearby, US artist Nicholas Galanin’s billboard Neon Anthem, with its instruction to “take a knee and scream until you can’t breathe”, resulted in the fun jumpscare of relentless screams ringing out over the grounds. Claudia Comte’s La Danse Macabre was billed as “a blistering allegory of capitalist apathy,” and depicted two pianists performing in front of a burning wooden sculpture as a motocross rider jumped through it. Sounds awesome. But it was just a video – that other universal medium for capitalist apathy. And that was about it for Dark Park – not even a meagre laser tower to guide you across the gravel.

If Dark Park taketh away, the music program giveth real good. On Thursday night, the ethereal Beth Gibbons of Portishead played a knotty set of baroque melancholia at The Odeon, the nine-piece band expertly weaving a web for Gibbon’s classic quiver to crawl through. The songs were careful, beautiful, impressive. But when the sparse piano chords of Portishead’s Roads opened the encore – the first of two Portishead songs, alongside a tremendous version of Glory Box – goosebumps came on strong. Because of nostalgia, but also because her voice only needs plain chords and a tempo to split you in two.

Same with Luritja singer-songwriter Keanu Nelson, who played a touching set of dreamy, lo-fi sketches at The Playhouse Theatre on Friday night. Based in the remote community of Papunya, northwest of Alice Springs, Nelson’s music has recently caught the ears of the small-press, DIY community, both here and abroad. On stage in Hobart for the first time, he stood motionless in mirrored sunglasses, a green parka and tracksuit pants, singing simple tales of family and home in both English and Papunya. Flanked by a guitarist feeding licks through a delay pedal over dinky beats and synth swells, Nelson’s bare bones, hands-in-pockets vibe landed lovely, like watching private, earnest songs be written and recede in real time.

After a run to The Grand Poobah to see local madman Spod turn a room of hoons into converts to his hilarious beat orgy, I caught US duo Clown Core at The Odeon. The anonymous masked pair are more cult performance piece than band, and the packed crowd of fans holding homemade signs and starting a circle pit were proof. The two lanky clowns played a fusion of growling metal and day spa, jazz-lite, in front of goofy onscreen messages like, “Calzone will not be tolerated,” and, “Thank you for your money. Please leave.” Super fun.

So was US darkwave group Cold Cave, which played the same room the following night. The four-piece felt custom-built for Mofo, packing black sunglasses, torn jeans, sincere synth jams and howling vocals. Their inspiration might be the entire venn diagram of New Order and Joy Division, but leader Wesley Eisold sells it with strong hooks, smart songwriting and the commitment of someone who can’t do anything else with their life. John Baizley of Georgian heavy metal act Baroness seemed the same, intent on Sunday night wrestling his charges over the guardrails of the genre into prog, blues, folk, garage, and whatever else he likes to listen to. Those are the kind of bands I believe.

Outside, the crisp streets of Hobart seemed to be a little less washed with red lights and visual art this year, at least if you didn’t count the creep of vinyl bars, pop-ups or the DJ belting out bangers from the late-night window of Medici pizza. Maybe that’s because a stack of it was underground.

Deep under an old bank – called The Old Bank – Brazilian artist Paul Setúbal’s Because the Knee Bends asked punters to squeeze past a masked figure bashing in the walls of a hallway with a police baton. The apprehension of having to be involved in the scene in order to “get out” was real. A female friend said this safe proximity to violence was both terrifying and unexpectedly exhilarating – that “as a woman, there’s nothing scarier than a hooded man being violent”. Just being able to walk past it felt like a gift.

Violence also rippled from those sheep heads underneath the Dangerfield sales racks. They were the work of Trawlwoolway artist Nathan Maynard, who was last here in 2023 with his short film My Journey. This work’s title, We threw them down the rocks where they had thrown the sheep, is a recorded quote by a convict sheep farmer who, with three co-workers, shot around 30 Aboriginal people on 10 February 1828. What became known as the Cape Grim Massacre was retaliation for the alleged destruction of the same number of sheep. “It’s just one example in this country of where white people valued sheep more than black human life,” Maynard told the Koori Mail in the lead up to Dark Mofo.

Descending down the concrete corridor off Collins Street, the smell hit first – a pungent tang. Then the sight of the heads floating in specimen jars, arranged on shelving under flickering lights. Some smiled, others were blank, all well-preserved. Yes, in the room the feeling was gory – only after does the sadness settle in.

Phillipines-born performer Joshua Serafin also works in the shadow of Western colonisation, though their work seeks to transcend it. Walking into the grand old Theatre Royal (which, speaking of colonisation’s shadow, first opened only nine years after the Cape Grim Massacre), it was hard not to notice the first five rows of seats were covered in plastic. The reason why soon becomes apparent. Serafin emerged naked and began athletically cloaking their body in viscous, black goo while cartwheeling around the stage. The substance and activity made their body look magically fluid, as if expanding outwards into a cloak, only for it to melt and reassemble in the blink of an eye. Breathtaking stuff. Serafin says the work is an attempt to shirk binary genders and transcend form into something undefinable. Performance art is chockas with this kind of lofty hyperbole, but for 20 minutes VOID actually achieved it. Remarkable.

The fingerprints of a fresh artistic director are hard to discern on a multi-headed beast like Dark Mofo, but on-ground the succession plan seemed smooth. And promising. Some will say it was too different, others will say it hasn’t changed enough. That depends on what you want and expect from it. One friend who went to Night Mass for the first time was a bit disappointed it wasn’t “crazier”, like they’d heard about. But Dark Mofo is the runway for whatever you want it to be. Or maybe they hadn’t found the dildo room.

At Mona on Friday, I walked through Arcangelo Sassolino’s In The End, The Beginning, a new exhibition by the Italian artist that “uses technology and mechanics to reveal the inner life of his raw materials”. I loved it for its minimalist, banal danger, and tension in plain things like a boulder bending a huge pane of glass to the edge of breaking point, molten steel splashing around a room, and a block of wood creaking to life as a hydraulic steel truncheon slowly split it in half.

“What I’m trying to capture is the change of state,” Sassolino says about his exhibit. “That instant in which something is becoming something else, that energy and power that exist in the flash of absolute instability between moments of equilibrium that are the before and the after.”

This hinge between the before and after is Dark Mofo’s sweet spot. I can’t think of another event that attempts to hold the shutter open at “the flash of absolute instability between moments of equilibrium” long enough for you to inspect it. To walk in and take your time. Get a doughnut, watch a car crash, deal with discomfort, try the possum bao and transcend for a week or two. You just have to be ready to open your eyes.

The writer travelled to Hobart as a guest of Dark Mofo.