‘A space for mourning' or a trauma theme park? Dark Mofo struggles with its most powerful works

The Guardian

a day ago

It's dusk on Friday as we follow the sounds of screaming through a former industrial estate in downtown Hobart. My friend and I arrive at a field of astroturf facing a 12-metre-wide scaffold emblazoned with neon white text that reads:
'I'VE COMPOSED A NEW NATIONAL ANTHEM.
TAKE A KNEE
AND SCREAM
UNTIL
YOU CAN'T BREATHE.'
As we watch, a group of four young boys follow the instructions, their pubescent voices fraying, while a fifth boy films them. In front of them, five women line up and perform the action, laughing, while a security guard takes a photo. 'Cute,' says my companion. I tell her that the artist dedicated this work to Black deaths in custody. Her face falls.
We're in Dark Mofo festival's family-friendly precinct Dark Park – a playground of big art and bars, food trucks and fire-pits. Like Mona, the private museum from which it sprung, Dark Mofo presents art largely without labels and wall text, liberating viewers from the tyranny of orthodoxy. But information can be empowering, too – and some art experiences are richer for it. The signage for this particular work bears only its title, Neon Anthem, and the artist, Nicholas Galanin. The one-line description on the festival website reads: 'A space for mourning, protest, and catharsis. Take a knee.'
Galanin, a First Nations Tlingit and Unangax artist from Alaska, created the first iteration of this installation for the Seattle Art Museum. The text, he wrote, is 'a pointed reference to the murders of Eric Garner, George Floyd, Tyre Nichols, and all people of color who have been murdered at the hands of police and agents of the American state'.
'Asking participants to take a knee is a position of deference and worship turned refusal,' Galanin said. 'Asking them to scream until they can't breathe encompasses protest and prayer aimed at tearing down the systems built to enforce Whiteness, White privilege, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist control.'
It's disorienting to encounter such a work in an amusement park-style context, among laughing families and groups of friends. They've come here for a fun night out or a sensory adventure: in a shed next door you can clamber into a coffin and get your photo taken, followed by a cocktail and a cheese platter; in a nearby concrete hangar you'll find a mesmerising kinetic light display.
Revisiting Galanin's work over Dark Mofo's opening weekend, I witnessed moments of catharsis – but there was no obvious sense of mourning or protest. It felt particularly notable on a weekend where rallies were happening across Australia in response to the death in custody of 24-year-old disabled Warlpiri man Kumanjayi White.
This sense of dissonance persisted across the weekend, which featured multiple political works about violence (often racist violence) presented without contextual information. These works often happened in unconventional spaces – including a store basement and a former bank vault – among predominantly white audience members who, for the most part, seemed curious-but-perplexed, or in search of a thrill.
I watched a woman browse her phone in front of a massive video artwork showing Afro-Cuban performance artist Carlos Martiel naked and strung up from a ceiling beam by a hangman's noose. I listened to people laughing and discussing their evening plans while wandering through Trawulwuy artist Nathan Maynard's installation of 480 sheep heads, commemorating a massacre of Aboriginal people in Tasmania's north west. I saw a smiling teenage boy wander through a narrow corridor as Brazilian performance artist Paul Setúbal, dressed in riot gear, belted the walls with a baton in a work inspired by his childhood experience of police violence.
Encountering these and other works in a compressed time frame, I sometimes felt as though I was in a trauma theme park, where tourists came to be entertained by the artists' lived experiences.
Presenting provocative art to unsuspecting audiences in strange places is Dark Mofo's MO, and its frequent magic. Ask any devotee what they love about the festival, and they'll tell you stories of unexpected adventures and strange encounters; the work they stumbled upon by chance and were enchanted, shocked or thrilled by.
Mystery and surprise are crucial ingredients in this recipe, which explains the minimal contextual info provided – no map or app to see what is where, and no explanatory wall texts. People tend to follow the smell of smoke, the sound of beats, or the red lighting and neon crosses that mark festival venues.
Variety is also key to Dark Mofo. This year, political and profound art rubbed shoulders with the playful and the puerile: you could wander into a 19th century masonic lodge to see a supersized screen showing a gruelling trial-by-baptism in a salt lake, endured by artist Ida Sophia; you could also walk into a church and find a giant nude goblin with its tits out, throwing peace salutes (Travis Ficarra's Chocolate Goblin).
But in this fun park atmosphere, art that is more complex or political risks being trivialised, reduced or obscured. At Maynard's installation, audiences were forced to rely on invigilators and a sometimes unclear soundtrack to provide key context. A friend overheard one of the attendants tell visitors that the artwork was about 'Aboriginal people [who] took some sheep. The British punished them and threw them off a cliff'. For an artwork geared at educating non-Indigenous viewers, the presentation was flawed.
Other works fared better. Filipino artist Joshua Serafin performed his eco-sexual dance ritual Void to a full and fully-attentive house at Theatre Royal for 50 minutes, four nights in a row, receiving standing ovations. Paula Garcia's Crash Body – a 50kph head-on collision between two cars – worked as a context-free spectacle; you didn't need to know about her longstanding interest in violence, or her experience growing up during the cold war, to appreciate it.
Paul Setúbal's participatory performance Because The Knees Bend was a standout: an effective and fascinating social experiment. A menacing, enforcer-style figure, Setúbal stalked menacingly up and down a narrow, brightly-lit corridor in a decommissioned underground bank vault, enacting violence on its walls. When one person dared to walk through, others began to follow. Setúbal quickly became the least interesting aspect of the performance: the real theatre was how you and other audience members reacted.
Setúbal says all his works attempt to transform 'difficult energy' in his audience. 'Some people are afraid, some people are laughing, some people maybe think it's bullshit – and this [happens] all together in this tiny corridor,' he told me.
When Because The Knees Bend premiered at London's Southbank Centre in 2023, he says, responses ran the gamut from tears to aggression. One woman wrote to him afterwards to say the experience enabled her to process her own trauma. At Dark Mofo, he says, two people on opening weekend punched the walls until they bled.
Asked why his work was presented without context, Setúbal says it would 'not be a real experience' for the audience if they knew what was coming, and what it meant: 'I think art can be a kind of experience, and we create our own sense about this experience, and maybe this can help us through something.'
Some artwork benefits from a lack of context, others don't. It's a curator's job to gauge the intent of the artist and the opportunity of the artwork, anticipate the needs of the audience, then build the bridge that best connects them. When this works – when the art is good and the audience is engaged – the connection feels electric. When it doesn't, it feels, at best, like a missed opportunity. When the art is informed by trauma and a lived experience of oppression and violence, it can feel exploitative.
Wandering around Dark Mofo, I wondered if the festival could adopt Mona's opt-in approach, where artwork is presented 'raw' but visitors can easily access more information via the O app. Mystery is easy; understanding is more elusive – but surely worth your best shot.
Dark Mofo continues now and ends on 15 June, followed by the annual winter solstice swim on 21 June.