Debaucherous Feasts, Human Pyramids, a Ritual Burning: A Latecomer’s Guide to Dark Mofo

Dark Mofo always sells out quickly. Even at the height of a now-packed winter festival season, its singular programming draws a tidal wave of mainlanders to the island state.

If tickets slipped away this year while you languished in the queue, there are still options. The first is to try your luck with a resale ticket. As of 10am today, major events like Night Mass, Princess Nokia, Solas and the Nude Solstice Swim have all come back into play, and tickets will be coming up almost daily until the festival. Beyond that, there’s an expansive program of free art, a sordid door-sale-only soiree called Help Me Through the World; and even more secretive parties yet to be announced.

The extravagant Winter Feast is open to all comers. Every night of the festival, it takes over Princes Wharf and Salamanca Lawns with more than 75 stalls selling Tasmanian food, wine and spirits. Inside, there’ll be feasting at long tables lit by candles and neon crosses, while musicians play from the gallery overhead. Outside, you’ll find open flames, performers and whole beasts on the spit. This year’s international guest chef is Floriano Pellegrino, who operates Puglia’s Michelin-starred Bros’ restaurant with his wife, Isabella Poti. Alongside Roberto Mele of Hobart bakery Mama, he’s created a dish of lemon foam encased in a mould of Poti’s lips; you’ll have to lick them to get a taste. Single-night tickets are available on the day, or you can book a pass for the season or either week of the festival.

Another open-invitation event is the three-part Ogoh-ogoh ritual: the Purging, the Procession and the Burning. Based on a Balinese tradition, the giant Ogoh-ogoh effigy – this year in the form of an endangered Pedra Branca skink – takes up residence for two weeks in Dark Park, where visitors come to write down their fears and commit them to the creature’s belly. On the last night of the festival, it’s paraded through the streets to the Regatta Grounds, where all those fears are released in a final conflagration on the water’s edge.

Plus, practically all of the festival’s sprawling arts program is free to enter. Exhibitions are held right across Hobart – from Rosny Farm, where Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s monstrous hand-carved dogs keep sentry, to the Old Mercury Building, where a video work by Hayley Millar Baker evokes First Nations matriarchal power, to Mona itself. Museum entry is ticketed, but Ryoji Ikeda’s monumental light sculpture spectra will again be visible for miles around.

A suite of major installations will be stationed at the festival hub, Dark Park. The free art park takes on a whole new dimension this year, with a 48,000-tonne ferry – the new Spirit of Tasmania V – looming from the neighbouring docks. Its freight decks – along with the MAC 02 Cruise Terminal – will become the cavernous backdrop to a series of video, sound and light-based installations, including menacing kinetic sculptures by artists like Monica Bonvicini and Lolo & Sosaku, and unsettling video works by Arthur Jafa and Berna Reale. The centrepiece, though, is Soundspace, a special Dark Mofo commission by Dutch artist and composer Boris Acket. Inspired by the euphoric, communal aspects of club culture, Acket describes his installations as “closed-loop instruments” of sound, light and motion. He claims Soundspace will be one of the largest spatial sound works ever created, using 135 light and speaker winches to conjure a pulsating, sonorous “cloud” that envelops the audience.

Dark Mofo’s cutting-edge, and entirely free, performance program centres on the 1850s-built Pianos Warehouse in North Hobart. Here you can see two exclusive performances by Mexico’s Kiyo Gutiérrez, who uses her body to explore the arbitrary violence – as well as the porosity – of national borders. Both the durational Un muro que parte el cuerpo en dos (A wall that breaks the body in two), which sees a brick wall erected across the artist’s body, and the shorter Hairline Border – in which she drags a concrete slab across the floor with her hair – will be staged only once during the festival. In another Australian-first, leading Guatemalan performance artist Regina José Galindo debuts Times of War: a “quiet protest” against the global resurgence of violence and how quickly its victims slip from the headlines.

Over several days, the renowned Tongan-born, New Zealand-based endurance artist Kalisolaite ‘Uhila performs Fakahoko, a work that reflects on the bonds forged through acts of labour, kindness and rebellion. And not far away, at City Hall, Belgian artist Ruben Bellinkx stages his tense, visceral work Stasis – in which a group of identically besuited men form a strange human pyramid, standing atop tables held between their teeth – over a total of 24 tic-inducing performances.

The festival has another freely accessible gathering place in Basilica, a deconsecrated sandstone church in the city. In proper Dark Mofo style, this once-holy site has been given an uncanny makeover, with red light seeping from the windows and doorway. This year, as you get a drink from the bar, you’ll experience Gabriel Lester’s The Sky Caving In: an elegiac vision of end times, where ash is falling from above. Basilica is also where you can queue for the extremely rare chance to see Sculpt – a feature film starring Willem Dafoe that can be viewed by just one person at a time (only a few hundred people have seen it since its release a decade ago). Each day, the first nine punters in line can book a time to be “exfiltrated” to a disused facility outside of town for a private screening.

Broadsheet is a proud media partner of Dark Mofo. Dark Mofo ticket resales are now live. Check out the full program at darkmofo.net.au.