Dark Mofo returns to Lutruwita/Tasmania from 11–22 June 2026. Organisers invite audiences to embrace the cold for a packed program of art, performance, live music, movies and more.
The midwinter festival will introduce art into sites around Nipaluna/Hobart including Spirit of Tasmania V, a 48,000-tonne ship moored in Dark Park.
Highlights include Candela Capitán’s cam-girl choreography, body-wrenching performances by Kiyo Gutiérrez, a very, very exclusive film by Loris Gréaud, rabid robot dogs by Lolo and Sosaku, and a ziggurat of tables and men, held aloft by their own teeth, by Ruben Bellinkx. Music swerves genres from hyperpop to black metal, with appearances by artists who can’t be seen anywhere else in Australia, including Princess Nokia, Power Trip, Sega Bodega and more.
Annual rites such as the Winter Feast, Night Mass, Ogoh-Ogoh and the skin-tightening Nude Solstice Swim will also return.
Artistic Director Chris Twite said: ‘On land and sea, Dark Mofo 2026 will rage in cacophony and seek solace in silence. Boundary-pushing artists from all over the world will descend on Tasmania to nourish visitors hungry for challenge, discovery and distraction. Their works confront the things that keep us up at night—for better and for worse—and they’ve only become more relevant since we first programmed them.’
As well as theatres and art spaces, the festival will inhabit giant warehouses, a former piano showroom, an abandoned institution, a deconsecrated church, The State Cinema and the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona). The festival will stretch beyond Hobart to Launceston in the north and will also present a work in an undisclosed Tassie town.
Tickets go on sale to subscribers at 10am Wednesday 1 April AEDT and to all comers from midday. Subscribe for updates at www.darkmofo.net.au.
* denotes Australian exclusive.
** denotes commission by Dark Mofo.
ART + PERFORMANCE
Five dancers and five computers spawn a kaleidoscope of screens and bodies, desire and consumption, in SOLAS* by Candela Capitán (ESP).
Sculpt: Eye of the Duck* by Loris Gréaud is a work of elusive intensity that attendees will see alone or not at all. For ten years, the French conceptual artist’s destabilising audiovisual experience has circulated in fragments, viewed in full by fewer than 500 people worldwide.
Kiyo Gutiérrez (MEX) puts her body on the line in Un muro que parte el cuerpo en dos (A wall that breaks the body in two)* and Hairline Border*, performances that powerfully communicate the violence of borders.
In Times of War (Darkness)**, the artist’s first ever Australian performance, Regina José Galindo (GTM) is naked and vulnerable, illuminated and then swallowed by darkness.
Stasis* by Ruben Bellinkx (BEL) will see a group of interdependent men uphold a system that imprisons them.
Five works will be shown aboard Spirit of Tasmania V including the illuminated text-based installation There’s Nothing Left to Pray For** by Chunxiao Qu, a glaring emblem of one mother’s pain as hope collapses and something more volatile takes hold.
Military menace builds in the video works Palomo* and La Sombra*. The city of Belém holds its breath as Berna Reale (BRA), bridled and uniformed, patrols the streets atop a blood-red horse, and a German-made leopard tank relentlessly pursues Regina José Galindo (GTM) across a barren field.
Arthur Jafa’s (USA) APEX* is a techno-driven montage fusing pop culture, history and the present into a charged expression of Black life, culture, and resistance.
Autonomous robot dogs roam an unstable field of industrial sound, light and fog in Lolo & Sosaku’s (ARG) (JPN) Perros Chaos**. Tension thickens and chaos encroaches, mutating the space beyond human recognition.
Elsewhere, Lolo & Sosaku (ARG)(JPN) will also present Êlêctron 45Cc L=20nm W20nm*, a sprawling live performance in the round, where machines clash and grind, sparks fly, and smoke rises to form intense sound sculptures.
At Basilica, The Sky Caving In* by Gabriel Lester (NLD) simulates the end raining down upon us.
Boris Acket’s Soundscape** is an immersive kinetic cloud of sound and light, constantly shifting, collapsing and reforming.
Breathing* by Monica Bonvicini (ITA) is female presence and power rendered loud in swinging leather. Resembling both a whip and a witch’s broom, what might this sculpture sweep away?
Eternity the Butterfly is a contemporary Indigenous haunting. Harnessing breath and movement, Hayley Millar Baker (AUS) calls ancestors close, mapping an unbroken line of cultural endurance.
Suspended mid-snarl, The Dogs are a manifestation of artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s (AUS) childhood fears, cultural omens, and the systems deployed to imprison, exclude and control.
Sound seeps from the very substance of things in Tactus, an installation by Jacob Leary (AUS), Dylan Sheridan (AUS) and Sean O’Connell (AUS) at Good Grief Studios.
What Did You Say? is about words unheard and words unspoken. UTAS Creative & Performing Arts presents a series of disquieting moments that reverberate through the Centre for the Arts and beyond.
All the fires come alive uncovers arcane knowledge, spirits, and alchemy in the collections of the State Library and Archives of Tasmania, where contemporary artists and esoteric texts reignite what’s unseen.
Vipoo Srivilasa’s (AUS/THA) If We’re Being Honest is a tactile realm of clay and sound, where making, offering, and confessing reveal what the subconscious longs to surface. Presented by Plimsoll Gallery and UTAS.
Mingle with creatures real and imagined in TrunkMan—SBG, a surreal playground at Contemporary Art Tasmania. This immersive installation by Xiyue (CiCi) Zhang (AUS) contends that stories both magical and strange unfold on our island every day.
Dark Mofo Films returns with Stone, Metal Skin, Sirāt, The Zone of Interest, Titane, Perfect Days, Blaze, Noise, The Cars That Ate Paris, Uncut Gems, Razorback, This is England, Head On and Somersault.
MUSIC
The supreme witch of New York’s hip-hop underground, Princess Nokia* (USA) dials up merciless lyricism and surreal self-portraits.
UNADULTER8 is dance music with dream logic. A new AV experience from Glaswegian innovator Sega Bodega* (GBR).
Power Trip* (USA) is adrenaline-fuelled thrash metal from Texas. Enraged vocals and relentless riffs.
After a decade-long silence, elusive Manchester outfit the World United Lucifer Youth Foundation, aka WU LYF* (GBR), resurfaces with vocal-shredding melodrama.
Danny Brown (USA), Detroit’s master of reinvention, pushes hip hop into wild and exhilarating territory. Abrasive, experimental rap.
Sassy 009* (NOR) is the sultry, shapeshifting electropop project from Oslo-based producer, songwriter and vocalist Sunniva Lindgård.
Recoil as Oklahoma City’s sludgy noise rock quartet Chat Pile (USA) transforms Altar Bar into a grindhouse slaughterfest of sound.
New York composer Kelly Moran* (USA) coaxes vast emotional weather from the piano with compositions that bloom towards quiet rapture.
Acid Mothers Temple* (JPN) abducts minds with their sprawling, improvised psychedelic music from Japan, guided by ‘cosmic translator’ Makoto Kawabata.
Dizzying electropop duo Purity Ring (CAN) build worlds of their own with euphoric soundscapes and spectral, stream-of-consciousness vocals.
Headache* (GBR) is music to make you forget yourself. AI-spoken musings drift over downtempo electronics in this mysterious collaboration between London-based producer Vegyn and poet Francis Hornsby Clark.
Soul-bound to her computer, electronic artist Ninajirachi (AUS) helms a new generation of maximalist EDM.
A legion of machine-steppers will hammer to a thunderous set to mark ten years of Gabber Eleganza’s (ITA) Hakke Show, a devotee of hardcore.
Borderlands** is a night of extreme atmospheres of light and sound curated by Lawrence English / Room40. Xiu Xiu (USA) will perform the fractured, industrial soundscape of David Lynch’s midnight masterpiece Eraserhead, Loscil (CAN) offers destruction and renewal through consuming sounds and visions of British Columbia’s wildfires, and Amby Downs (AUS) uses sparse instrumentation, field recordings and harmonic drones to trace the spread of feral deer across the Australian continent.
From ’90s alt rock to industrial techno, revered producer and composer Daniel Avery visits every corner of his sound in his most ambitious show to date.
Mysterious East London collective Snapped Ankles* (GBR) summons the untamed energy of the forest with wooden log synths and propulsive rhythms.
Unrestrained and brutal, clipping. (USA) are an experimental hip-hop trio from the United States’ West Coast.
Off-kilter South London post-punkers Dry Cleaning (GBR) deliver deadpan spoken word narration, surreal observations, odd images that linger.
Texan psych rock pioneers The Black Angels (USA) mark the 20th Anniversary of their debut album, Passover, a record that helped define the 21st century psych revival.
Grief, grace and grandeur from Blackwater Holylight (USA). These Portland-born sirens carve out a sound both delicate and heavy, with doom-drenched riffs and shimmering vocals.
Hymns to the Dead* is the festival’s annual night of deafening metal curated by Tassie death metal vocalist Chalky. It features symphonic gothic metal from Tiamat (SWE), blackened wails from Negative Plane (USA) and female rage channelled into brutal death metal by Emasculator (CZE/USA).
Lord Spikeheart* (KEN) is a figurehead of Kenya’s metal scene, pushing the limits of extreme music.
Hard-edged and rhythm-driven, Protomartyr (USA) present austere post-punk from Detroit’s industrial sprawl.
From Tokyo’s queer club underground, Japanese-German experimentalist Nina Utashiro (JPN, USA, DEU) coils raw vocals around writhing, cinematic sound worlds.
Unflinching self-portraits and ferocious charisma from Miss Kaninna (AUS), a First Nations rising star.
Descend into grime-streaked electronic wastelands, borne of the Bristol producer Iglooghost’s (GBR) hyperactive imagination.
At Launceston’s Albert Hall, Folk Bitch Trio (AUS) spins fantasies, daydreams, and humiliations into harmonies both rich and visceral, and rapper Baker Boy (AUS) accesses ancestral power, resilience and reclamation in words woven through Yolŋu Matha, English, and Burarra language.
RITUALS
The Winter Feast warms and brightens our darkest nights, taking over Princes Wharf and Salamanca Lawns throughout the festival. This year, the Feast welcomes guest chef Floriano Pelligrino, who runs Michelin-starred restaurant Bros’ in Italy with his partner Isabella Potì. He’s paired with Tasmania-based Roberto Mele of MAMA Hobart Artisanal Bakery. Stallholders, music, and more to be announced.
On the festival’s Friday and Saturday nights, congregate for Night Mass, a shapeshifting party that secrets away over 150 artists and musicians at a site spanning blocks of the CBD.
This year’s Ogoh-Ogoh ritual solicits fears to feed a giant Pedra Branca Skink crafted by Balinese artists. On Sunday 21 June, revelers will join a procession from Franklin Park to Regatta Grounds for the totem’s fiery sacrifice, a collective catharsis in purifying flame.
The festival closes with the Nude Solstice Swim, which returns to Long Beach in Sandy Bay on Monday 22 June, ending the longest night of the year.
MONA
Upriver in Berriedale, the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) will pulse with the underground Sex + Death Day Club, and British ensemble The Gesualdo Six will lend their voices to Anselm Kiefer’s monumental work Elektra.
The museum will unveil more new art than any year since the opening of the Pharos Wing in 2017.
In his solo exhibition, Hard Core, Julian Charrière gathers sculptures made of coal, lava, molten computers, onyx and obsidian. There are plants preserved cryogenically, snails slurping the calcium carbonate from marble statues, and a vending machine full of fossilised ammonites.
Charrière’s Breathe is a permanent installation built into the foundations of Mona’s brand new wing. It releases oxygen molecules trapped in iron ore, inviting visitors to be the first life forms to take in this ancient air.
In Absence is an architectural installation created by artist Yhonnie Scarce and Melbourne studio Edition Office for the NGV Architecture Commission. The nine-metre-high timber tower takes inspiration from traditional eel traps and is adorned with 1,600 hand-blown black glass murnong, or yams.
And Ryoji Ikeda’s light-tower, spectra, will return to pierce the night sky.
