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Highlights in both cities include:
Midnight Oil + Mofo Sessions + pakana kanaplila & Tasdance: tuylupa + Terrapin: Monster Trucks + Ashleigh Musk & Michael Smith: Fertile Ground + Ed Atkins (UK) + Calvin Bowman + Faux Mo + Mo’Ju + Kartanya Maynard & Vernon Ah Kee + Gwenno (UK) + Julie Gough: The Missing spanning the Midland Highway
Launceston highlights:
Legs on the Wall: THAW + Megan Cope: Untitled (Death Song) + Thomas Demand: Pacific Sun (GER) + Warren Mason: Tin Camp Studio + Emily Sanzaro: Awaken
nipaluna / Hobart highlights:
Robin Fox: BEACON + Theresa Sainty & Sharnie Read: PANUPIRI, WITHI MAPALI + Terrapin with Dylan Sheridan: All Day Breakfast + Alicia Frankovich: AQI2020 (NZ) + Anri Sala: Time No Longer (ALB/GER) + DJ TR!P & Scot Cotterell: Organ Donor + Quartet for the End of Time 
Mona Foma 2022 presents a sprawling program of music and events celebrating the depth of lutruwita / Tasmania’s homegrown talent alongside acclaimed acts from further afield. From a dancework exploring the journey of the pakana people, a cross-section of live music that includes Bach and Midnight Oil, to cement-mixer-monster-trucks, aerialists atop a dripping iceberg and high-powered lasers illuminating the landscape, the festival includes over 300 artists, across 40 venues in Launceston, nipaluna / Hobart and the Midland Highway in between.
Brian Ritchie, Artistic Director, Mona Foma, says: ‘Mona Foma reprises its dual-city model and continues to focus on local Tasmanian performers and makers, on their own and in collaboration with interstate and international artists. It is exciting to contribute to Tasmania’s cultural reawakening and reopening.’
Kicking off in Launceston, the incredible landscape of Cataract Gorge plays host to the epic work THAW by globally renowned physical theatre company Legs On The Wall. A lone aerial artist performs—for eight precarious hours a day —while harnessed to the top of a sculpted 2.4 tonne block of ice slowly melting as it hangs high over the Gorge.
Also in the Gorge, musicians Karlin Love and Jon Addison will serenade visitors as they stroll along the Gorge paths, their music inspired by tiny ecosystems spotted along the way.
Prominent Trawlwoolway artist, writer and curator Julie Gough will create The Missing, a site-specific project along the Midland Highway. Four silhouette scenes inspired by the 1830s government propaganda known as ‘Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines’ will appear along the highway, visible to cars driving between Launceston and nipaluna / Hobart. They join the existing 16 colonial silhouettes, and provide a more truthful account of this place’s history of invasion and its tens of thousands of years of continuing culture.
The grand space of Launceston’s old National Theatre, now used to store paper, will host the video artwork Pacific Sun by German artist Thomas Demand. Thomas recreates the famous YouTube clip of a cruise ship (barely) weathering a chaotic storm in the South Pacific—frame by frame.
A collection of sonic sculptures created by Quandamooka artist Megan Cope from discarded mining relics, geological samples and piano strings will be activated by Tasmanian musicians in live performances.
Proud Yuwaalaraay man Warren Mason will construct Tin Camp Studio, a-pop up space for performance, music story-telling and healing—made from salvaged materials and modelled on the typical Aboriginal-built tin camps found at the edge of countless Australian townships from the 1950s to today.
Australia’s most accomplished organist Calvin Bowman will play every single one of J.S. Bach’s organ works in one marathon 18-hour session at St John’s Anglican Church. He’ll also perform a shorter work, Mary – Modernist – Minimalism, in nipaluna / Hobart.
Cross-cultural avant-garde musicians, ZÖJ, will pop up in multiple locations around Launceston, including Design Tasmania’s Organology, an exhibition of curious and master-crafted instruments, including electrophones, aerophones, membranophones, idiophones and chordophones. While in QVMAG’s darkened planetarium, contemporary harpist Emily Sanzaro—who is also an occupational therapist and therapeutic musician—will perform her debut solo album, Awaken.
In both Launceston and nipulana / Hobart, legendary Australian rock band Midnight Oil will be performing (two shows in each city), playing songs from their forthcoming new album, recent music from The Makarrata Project (inspired by the Uluru Statement from the Heart), alongside classics from their back catalogue. This comes ahead of the Oils touring Australia for the very last time.
Once again, both cities will experience Mofo Sessions: evening concerts celebrating live music, with bars and food options aplenty. Ticketholders can revel at Royal Park in Launceston or catch the ferry to Berriedale for shows on the Mona Lawns in nipaluna / Hobart where spectra will be lighting up the night’s sky. The line-up includes Gwenno (UK), Mo’Ju, The Chills (NZ), Danny Healy Quartet, DENNI, Jason Whatley Quartet, Jay Jarome, Sabine Bester + the When Water Falls Ensemble, Prospectus Saxophone Quartet, Sandcastles and Surfilm.
One of Tasmania’s strongest emerging Aboriginal voices, Kartanya Maynard, collaborates with iconic Australian Aboriginal artist, Vernon Ah Kee, on two site specific text and sound installations. In Launceston, at Prince’s Square, waranta takamuna! expresses the many layers of assimilation brutally forced upon Tasmanian Aboriginal people, and specifically the history of the displacement of people to and from tayaritja (The Bass Strait Islands). In Hobart, at Parliament House Gardens, warr! celebrates the strength of Tasmanian Aboriginal protest from the very start of invasion to today, and kicks off directly after the Change The Date rally on Invasion Day.
tuylupa by pakana kanaplila and Tasdance will use dance, music and projections to explore what it means to keep the flame alive for 60,000 years, covering the journey of the palawa people and the stories of lutruwita / Tasmania.
Festival favourite Morning Meditations will take place at Riverbend Park in Launceston and at the LongHouse in nipaluna / Hobart. And Faux Mo invites punters along to a curated house party experience in secret locations in each city, with multiple two hour sessions over the course of the night.
Mo’Ju will be joined by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and Orchestra Victoria in nipaluna / Hobart, and play with her band in Launceston.
The creators of Mona Foma’s beloved Ubus, Terrapin, will transform giant cement mixers into real life Monster Trucks, roaming the streets of Launceston and nipaluna / Hobart throughout the festival.
UK digital virtuoso Ed Atkins’ high definition video works will be showcased in both cities. In Launceston, Ribbons features a generated avatar and anti-hero: a voyeur and troll; a graphic performing loss and monstrousness; and perhaps, a version of the artist himself. In nipaluna / Hobart, The Worm is a mid-lockdown phone call between the artist and his mother, recreated from the motion-capture suit he wore for the conversation.
Curated by Stompin’s Caitlin Comerford, Fertile Ground is a ground-breaking participatory performance, as two dancers and the audience engage with a brutalist pile of concrete over four hours. Also from Comerford and Stompin’, Rival Planes sees a pair of dancers reflect on the burden of beauty of sharing emotional baggage, with the help of coat hangers.
In nipaluna / Hobart, and exclusive to Tassie, BEACON by internationally acclaimed artist Robin Fox will use cutting edge technology to project powerful lasers above the city. An accompanying app will share stories of the mountain—PANUPIRI, WITHI MAPALI—from artists Theresa Sainty and Sharnie Read.
AQI2020 by New Zealand performance and installation artist Alicia Frankovich will see performers encased in a transparent sulfur-hazed box, evoking the apocalyptic atmosphere of 2019–2020 Australian bushfire season. The title references the Air Quality Index and is a timely reminder—here, now, mid-pandemic—of the perils of climate change.
Yet more organs feature in the world premiere of Organ Donor. DJ TR!P and Scot Cotterell rescue dozens of seventies-era organs from a fate worse than death (the rubbish tip), for one final musical fling in nipaluna / Hobart before they’re released.
A massive computer-generated work by Albanian artist Anri Sala will take over Princes Wharf 1, celebrating two musical moments of loss and humanity from history: Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, first performed by Messiaen in a POW camp during the Second World War; and the story of Ronald McNair, one of the few black astronauts, and a professional saxophonist. McNair planned to perform and record the first original piece of music in space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, which exploded seconds after take-off. Plus, trailblazing classical pianist Michael Kieran Harvey and friends will perform an exclusive concert of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time alongside Anri Sala’s vast video installation.
Multi-instrumentalist and composer Ron Nagorcka is joined by musicians to perform Ron’s original works for voice, electronic keyboard, didjeridu, clarinets and pipe organ, including settings of poems by Keith Harrison, in Snail Tracks.
In All Day Breakfast, Dylan Sheridan with Terrapin will whip up one of the most important meals of the day—a full cooked breakfast—prepared entirely by a pair of metal poles poked through a wall.
Over a marathon seven-hour performance at the LongHouse, seven members from FFLORA will each guide a diverse ensemble of musicians as they improvise around a different coloured theme.
Christopher Coleman and the Great Escape along with fellow Tasmanian artists Ben Salter and Celeste Evelyn come together for the first time in Archive 2022: monthly concerts to a live audience, and also broadcast on Edge Radio 99.3FM.
In PRIMORDIAL For Piano and Diverse Media, Gabriella Smart will pluck, stroke and hammer a “time travelling machine” to take her on a journey of science and sound.
Punters wearing Mona Foma x EPØKHE sunnies will be able to see elements that others can’t when they are granted exclusive access to a bizarre and unexpected adventure at nipaluna / Hobart’s Goods Shed.
An elegy for Australia’s long-lost video shops, Coil by re:group performance collective will blur the boundaries of theatre and film when clever technology allows a single performer to act in place of an entire film cast. Meanwhile, Good Video is a pop-up video installation by Stan Barnes, paying homage to various deaths: that of the video store; his father and his vast video library. At Good Night at Good Grief the installation experience will be accompanied by a set from local heroes The Native Cats, with fittingly VHS-inspired visuals.
Instrument Builders Project 6 sees two news artists forming an atelier and producing a collection of ‘personally tuned wearable acoustic pieces’ that can be experienced by visitors during bespoke fittings.
The festival runs from Friday 21 January through to Sunday 30 January 2022, with music and art taking place over two weekends—first in Launceston (Friday 21–Sunday 23 January) and then in nipaluna / Hobart (Friday 28–Sunday 30 January).
Mona Foma will require proof of vaccination for all ticketed events. Masks may be required in some settings. As always, Mona Foma will adhere to current Tasmanian Public Health measures for all events and will ensure that ticket holders and attendees are informed of any specific requirements in advance of the festival.
Tickets for Mona Foma 2022 are on sale from 10am on Monday 6 December. Subscribe to the mailing list to get first access: monafoma.net.au/subscribe
Mona Foma is supported by the Tasmanian Government through Events Tasmania. For more information please visit: monafoma.net.au