Art + Performance
Dark Mofo 2026 is a genuinely global program. Artistic Director Chris Twite says the works “confront the things that keep us up at night — for better and for worse.” Here’s what’s in store:
SOLAS* — Candela Capitán (Spain)
Five dancers and five computers collide in a kaleidoscope of screens and bodies, desire and consumption. Provocative, physical, and impossible to look away from.
Sculpt: Eye of the Duck* — Loris Gréaud (France)
An experience so exclusive it borders on myth. This destabilising audiovisual work has been seen in full by fewer than 500 people worldwide over the past decade. You’ll see it alone — or not at all.
Un muro que parte el cuerpo en dos + Hairline Border* — Kiyo Gutiérrez (Mexico)
Two performances that put the body on the line to communicate the violence of borders. Raw, political, and profoundly moving.
Times of War** — Regina José Galindo (Guatemala)
The artist’s first-ever Australian performance. Naked and vulnerable, illuminated and then swallowed by darkness.
Stasis* — Ruben Bellinkx (Belgium)
A group of interdependent men hold aloft a ziggurat of tables — using only their teeth. A darkly comic meditation on systems that imprison those who uphold them.
Perros Chaos** — Lolo & Sosaku (Argentina/Japan)
Autonomous robot dogs roam an unstable field of industrial sound, light, and fog. Tension thickens. Chaos encroaches.
Êlêctron 45Cc L=20nm W20nm* — Lolo & Sosaku (Argentina/Japan)
A sprawling live performance in the round — machines clash and grind, sparks fly, and smoke rises to form intense sound sculptures.
APEX* — Arthur Jafa (USA)
A techno-driven montage fusing pop culture, history, and the present into a charged expression of Black life, culture, and resistance.
The Sky Caving In* — Gabriel Lester (Netherlands) | at Basilica
A simulation of the end raining down upon us. You’ve been warned.
Soundscape** — Boris Acket
An immersive kinetic cloud of sound and light, constantly shifting, collapsing, and reforming.
Breathing* — Monica Bonvicini (Italy)
Female presence and power rendered loud in swinging leather. Resembling both a whip and a witch’s broom — what might it sweep away?
Eternity the Butterfly — Hayley Millar Baker (Australia)
A contemporary Indigenous haunting. Breath, movement, and ancestors called close — mapping an unbroken line of cultural endurance.
The Dogs — Abdul-Rahman Abdullah (Australia)
Suspended mid-snarl. A manifestation of childhood fears, cultural omens, and the systems deployed to imprison, exclude, and control.
Tactus — Jacob Leary, Dylan Sheridan & Sean O’Connell (Australia) | Good Grief Studios
Sound seeping from the very substance of things.
All the fires come alive — State Library and Archives of Tasmania
Arcane knowledge, spirits, and alchemy uncovered in the SLAT collections — where contemporary artists and esoteric texts reignite what’s unseen.
If We’re Being Honest — Vipoo Srivilasa (Australia/Thailand) | Plimsoll Gallery & UTAS
A tactile realm of clay and sound, where making, offering, and confessing reveal what the subconscious longs to surface.
TrunkMan — SBG — Xiyue (CiCi) Zhang (Australia) | Contemporary Art Tasmania
A surreal playground of creatures real and imagined. Stories both magical and strange, unfolding on our island every day.
What Did You Say? — UTAS Creative & Performing Arts | Centre for the Arts
Words unheard and words unspoken. Disquieting moments that reverberate.
Aboard Spirit of Tasmania V
Five works will be presented on the ship at Dark Park, 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. Plus video works Palomo* and La Sombra* by Berna Reale and Regina José Galindo respectively.
