It’s no secret that festivals in Australia have been doing it tough lately.
From the demise of iconic music mainstays like Splendour in the Grass — cancelled in 2024 and 2025, put on “indefinite hiatus” in 2026 — to Melbourne’s all-night arts festival White Night seeing a move to regional Victoria before being shelved, it seems like finding success on the festival circuit can be doomed from the get-go.
And yet, year on year, Tassie’s Dark Mofo seems to escape the festival downturn.
This year’s edition sold over 55,000 tickets to its most popular events, including the balls-out all-night party Night Mass, the much-loved multi-night Winter Feast, and the famous nude winter solstice swim.
So what is it that keeps the masses flocking back to this edgy, arty, at times disturbing, and always headline-grabbing festival, all the way down in Hobart in the middle of the bitter winter?
The first step starts with a complete lack of headline artists.
It’s a weird claim, to say that a festival seemingly allergic to booking mass-appeal bands is successful for exactly that reason — particularly in the internet age, when viral popularity seems king when it comes to selling tickets. But it is exactly this deep sense of discovery baked into the special sauce that makes up Dark Mofo (and, indeed, Mona) that delivers a deep sense of trust.
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Those in the know — and those who keep coming back, year after year — trust Dark Mofo’s uncanny ability to source the weirdest shit from across the globe, plonk it all together in a tiny town at the end of the world, and somehow make it all work.
The man in charge of retaining that trust is Artistic Director Chris Twite, who is relatively new at the helm of the Dark Mofo boat, one that’s sailed into the harbour, was rendered in glowing red light, and subsequently filled with performance art featuring creepy-crawling metal robots and smoking, smashed cars and red horses parading through empty streets (but more on that later).
And while Twite has now had two years to live up to the looming legacy of previous Dark Mofo Co-Founder and Artistic Director Leigh Carmichael, it is in Twite’s second year that he has settled into a new vision of the future; the future of both the festival and the world spinning around it.
This year, it wasn’t the headlines he was chasing, as much as the opposite: silence, reflection, stillness.
“In 2026, Dark Mofo remains as steadfast as ever to presenting works that are challenging and that meet the times in which we live,” Twite says. “Likewise, the audiences for Dark Mofo are brave enough to confront these questions.”
“’This year we asked audiences at different times to sink into the silence and be held by the cacophony. To feel that crushing weight of stillness; experience heaviness that gathers in moments of ritual, of reflection, of fear. And also to yield to the surge, the onslaught, the caterwaul of chaos as it closes in around them… Whether it’s Regina José Galindo confronting the systems of the military industrial complex by placing her own body in the line of a tank chasing her through a field – or it’s Chunxiao Qu’s devastating words laid bare in ‘there is nothing to pray for’, where her own pain as mother, stripped of hope, becomes emblematic of so many others.”
“But duality also exists between these forces like the silent gaze of a dancer in Candela Capitan’s Solas, whose stare pierces straight through the unrelenting onslaught of content that inundates us… None of these artists are holding back.”
In 2026, following a year of political and economic uncertainty, Dark Mofo asked us: in an age where everything is at your fingertips, how do you want to engage with art? Do you want to be fed something you already love via an algorithm, or do you want to be surprised and delighted by something you never imagined you could like? The weird, the odd, the uncomfortable?
For how could I have imagined that 34 men holding a tower of four dining tables in their teeth in a silent hall could make me consider the physical toll of modern life? That I would be delighted by a rubber tongue flapping the boom of an off-beat drum, as two men wielded an angle grinder and metal robot contraption to generate industrial electro noise accompanied by flying sparks? Therein lies the magic of Dark Mofo: it knows what you’ll be captivated by before you do. All you have to do is trust it.
A friend of mine attending Night Mass with a few Tassie friends expressed to me on Monday that she regretted spending too much time outside chatting, and not enough time exploring the popular, all-night party inside. It’s a rookie mistake: if you’re attending Dark Mofo for the first time, you have to remember the magic is in the nooks and crannies, the dark alleyways, down the basement stairs accompanied by a long line outside.
And so, if you want a festival to last these days, it has to be more. More than a viral triple j headliner, more than a headline-grabbing art piece. It has to tell us something, or allow us to tell ourselves something. It has to go deeper than we can go via a simple clickbait news story, or visually arresting Instagram post, or a catchy TikTok video. It has to tell us a story. It has to reach inside and connect.
