Latest news with #DarkMofo
The Guardian
a day ago
- Automotive
- The Guardian
At Dark Mofo, I joined thousands to watch an artist stage a car crash – months after I was in one
My windscreen exploded when I hit a 16-year-old cyclist with my Toyota Corolla in March, on what was meant to be just a quick trip the bakery. Glass covered the bag of pastries on my passenger seat as I came to a stop at the end of my street, just 200 metres from my front door. Having flown over my bonnet, the kid was lying on the dewy Brunswick asphalt in a crumple of shock and school uniform, the balance of our lives suspended in his cries: 'My back! My back! My back!' This past Saturday, three months to the day since that accident, I went to watch someone deliberately crash a car at Hobart's Dark Mofo festival. The Brazilian performance artist Paula Garcia was about to willingly pilot an Audi TT into a head-on collision with another Audi TT at the Royal Hobart Regatta Grounds. The work, Crash Body, was the first time Garcia had performed it before an in-person audience. Its first staging in 2020, then titled RAW, was live streamed from a São Paulo gallery when Brazil's pandemic lockdown came into effect on the day of the performance. A disciple of the famed Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović, Garcia spent eight years training her body and undertaking stunt driving lessons in preparation for RAW – the culmination of years of physically demanding works testing Garcia's bodily fragility, strength and resilience. She emerged from the car unscathed in 2020 – but one can't count on the same outcome twice. On Saturday, the cold winter night was thick with anticipation when, after a lengthy wait, Garcia and the stunt driver manning the other car strode into the clinical light bleaching Hobart's docks. They donned helmets, then strapped into roll cages replacing the cars' stripped interiors. Children in the crowd of approximately 4,000 emitted howls of bloodlust. For one man, the mechanophilia of the paint, chrome and rubber proved irresistible as he collected shots of the red car's sleek rear with a telephoto lens. Each car was a gleaming inversion of the other, Garcia's red and the stunt driver's black, with a racing stripe running from grill to windshield. The vehicles anthropomorphised as their engines roared to life. The black car circled the red before pursuing it out of sight into the black night, then chased it back again, faster and faster each time. Although it was initially described as taking two hours, this cat-and-mouse ballet lasted just 20-odd minutes. With tyres squealing, the drivers whipped through pools of standing water, waves catching the glare. A soundtrack of portentous synthesisers escalated, augmented by sounds transmitted from the microphones strapped to the cars' engines. The cars sped at each other, only to pull up alongside one another in a series of near misses. Ordinarily, one is unaware of life's sudden calamities until it's too late; afterwards, you are left decoding the events leading up as a postscript. Crash Body happens the other way around: the calamity is inevitable – but when it arrives, the impact is no less shocking. Finally, the cars flashed their lights from either end of the asphalt in silent challenge, then accelerated. As with my own crash, time froze with the first crunch of metal; a cloud of glass hung sparkling in the air, like a chandelier held aloft by invisible forces. A jolt of electricity shot up my spine and out of my mouth in a gasp; I then felt a wave of embarrassment, for having succumbed to the moment's titillation. After an anxious wait, Garcia was prised from the wreckage. She emerged gingerly at first, then pumped her fists in the air to cheers. Surprised by the lack of a Hollywood fireball, the bloodthirsty 10-year-olds behind me debated whether the performance had followed the 'laws of regular physics.' Garcia survived her collision but sustained significant bruising to her shoulders from the harness she wore. The young cyclist I hit, who showed remarkable bravery on the day, fractured two vertebrae and displaced another. To speak of luck is insensitive, but the truth is it could have been far worse if I had been travelling at speed or any number of other terrible variables. Two weeks ago, his mum texted to tell me that his new bike had arrived, and that the physio thinks he'll be able to play tennis again soon. When Garcia's twisted metal spectacle concluded, we were left to ponder life's precarity, to be thankful for the most important things – like when an accident could have been so much worse, or how precious our bodies are – and the miracle of getting to experience any of it at all, when everything could change irrevocably in an instant. The wreckage of Crash Body is available to see in Dark Park, Hobart, on 12-15 June, as part of Dark Mofo festival. The writer travelled as a guest of the festival.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
480 sheeps' heads in jars: Dark Mofo opens with another gory provocation
In the dimly-lit basement of a former furniture store in Hobart CBD, 480 embalmed sheep's heads in specimen jars are arranged on industrial shelving units: 24 racks, each four shelves high and with five jars per shelf, in a neat grid. The fastidiousness of the presentation sits at odds with the inherent violence of the material; so do the expressions on most of the sheep's faces, which range from serene to uncanny smiles. As if to dispel any false sense of quietude, the room's lighting periodically switches to nightmarish red. This is We threw them down the rocks where they had thrown the sheep, an installation by Trawulwuy artist Nathan Maynard, part of this year's Dark Mofo festival – the first after the often controversial festival took a year off in favour of a 'period of renewal'. Maynard's exhibition was the first announcement for the festival's return, and it drew some scepticism from members of the local Tasmanian Aboriginal community at the time. When it was announced via a teaser post featuring the quote 'What did you do with the bodies? – George Augustus Robinson, 1830', Tasmanian Aboriginal heritage officer Fiona Hamilton criticised Dark Mofo's 'gory fascination with the pain of our people'. Academic Greg Lehman, a descendant of the Trawulwuy people of north-east Tasmania, compared the 'ugly and tone-deaf' marketing of the project to the festival's widely criticised 2021 commission by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, who called for the donation of blood by First Nations people, in which to soak a union jack flag. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning The festival cancelled Sierra's work and apologised for the commission and their marketing of it, but its appetite for confronting – and gory – work is unabated. Visitors enter the space via a nondescript doorway on Collins Street marked by a red cross; an invigilator at the entrance warns them that the artwork 'may or may not be confronting'. There's no explanatory text or artist statement, and the artist agreed to only one interview, with the Indigenous-run paper Koori Mail – and on Thursday evening, the festival's opening night, visitors navigated the installation with varying levels of bemusement. Some entered the basement, saw the grisly cargo, and turned around and exited; others got their phones out and took pictures. When questioned by attenders, an invigilator at the room's entrance gamely attempted to encapsulate the dark history that inspired the work, and the ongoing issues that motivated Maynard to create it. 'We threw them down the rocks where they had thrown the sheep' is a quote from the journals of George Augustus Robinson, Tasmania's 'Chief Protector of Aborigines' from 1839 to 1849. Robinson was recounting an anecdote told to him with 'perfect indifference' by a perpetrator of one of the state's worst massacres: on 10 February 1828, four convict shepherds ambushed a group of Aboriginals at Cape Grim, in the island's north-west, shooting and driving about 30 of them off a 60-metre cliff, supposedly in retaliation for the destruction of about the same number of sheep. In his journal, Robinson wrote that he had issued the perpetrators a warning. The Cape Grim massacre is one of many that took place in Lutruwita/Tasmania during a state-orchestrated genocidal campaign against the island's First Peoples known as the Black War (1824-1832). Generally, there were no formal or legal consequences for white perpetrators. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Maynard told the Koori Mail last month that the massacre was 'just one example in this country of where white people valued sheep more than black human life'. In a statement to Guardian Australia, Dark Mofo's cultural adviser, Caleb Nichols-Mansell, said the work 'encourages a deeper investigation of the history, our shared pasts and an honest interrogation around these topics and themes that we typically avoid within arts and cultural settings'. The presentation of the sheep's heads in specimen jars points to a different kind of racist violence from the same era: the theft and trade of First Nations human remains, which occurred throughout Australia. These remains entered the private collections of white settlers and officials or were sold to museums and scientific institutions. The campaign for their repatriation has been running since the 1970s. Meanwhile, just 200 metres from the basement where Maynard's installation is held stands a statue of former governor Sir John Franklin, who is known to have collected the skulls of Aboriginal people. For visitors unaware of this context, the only clue is an audio track that plays in the corridor leading to the basement, featuring two voices – one Maynard's – expressing condemnation, anger and distress over the historical and continuing treatment of ancestral remains. It's hard to hear these voices clearly, but among the lines that cut through is the indelible exhortation: 'Imagine it was your mother or your grandmother who was collecting dust in a museum basement!' Maynard told the Koori Mail he hoped the installation would educate non-Indigenous people on Tasmania's violent past. It remains to be seen whether the work's enigmatic presentation will have the desired effect.
West Australian
5 days ago
- West Australian
Police enforcing road safety measures and penalties this King's Birthday weekend
Double demerits and other penalties for drivers will be in effect from Friday midnight through the end of the King's Birthday long weekend, as police ramp up public holiday crackdowns. The double-demerit system will come into effect in NSW from 12.01am on Friday, June 6, and end at 11.59pm on Monday, June 9 for speeding, illegal use of mobile phones, not wearing a seatbelt and riding without a motorcycle helmet. Police may also give additional demerit points if certain driving and parking offences are committed in a school zone. The ACT will also implement a similar double-demerit point system, with a single extra demerit point for all other traffic offences. Victoria Police is cracking down on dangerous driving behaviour over the long weekend, with the road safety blitz – Operation Regal – launching on Friday. Police say the number of lives lost on the road has surged to a 16-year high, with 37 fatalities recorded just in May. There have been 136 lives have been lost on Victorian roads this year, up by 14 per cent on the same time last year Road Policing Command Acting Assistant Commissioner David Byrt said the amount of road trauma the team had experienced halfway into the year had been 'extremely concerning'. 'Whether you're travelling across the state this weekend or heading to the alpine regions, please take extra care on the roads and be sure to drive to the conditions,' he said. 'We'll be highly visible and enforcing across the state's roads this long weekend, cracking down on any dangerous driving behaviour that puts other road users at risk.' Police have warned that speeding and distracted motorists will be their key focus over the King's Birthday long weekend, which has been identified as a high-risk period on Victoria's roads. Major arterials and highways leading to holiday hotspots will be targeted, including the alpine areas, with the snow season expected to begin from this weekend onwards. Drivers and motorists are also urged to avoid driving while impaired, as drug and alcohol testing will be conducted anywhere and at any time. 'We're appealing to everyone to make road safety their No.1 priority every time they get behind the wheel or are out using our roads to eliminate this unnecessary and avoidable trauma,' Mr Byrt said. 'We'll be highly visible and enforcing across the state's roads this long weekend, cracking down on any dangerous driving behaviour that puts other road users at risk.' Other states like South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory will not be imposing a double-demerit scheme for the long weekend, but road safety campaigns will be conducted. Tasmania Police has warned drivers and pedestrians to exercise safety and caution during Hobart's Dark Mofo musical festival, which kicks off on Friday. 'This year already, three pedestrians have died on Tasmanian roads, with a further 14 seriously injured,' Inspector John Toohey said. 'We're asking everyone to stay alert, avoid distractions such as phones or headphones and only cross at designated crossings. 'With many festival events taking place at night and in lowlight conditions, we're hoping to see responsible behaviour; that is, people looking out for each other, obeying traffic signals and being visible in the dark.'
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Yahoo
‘Highly visible': Double-demerit warning
Double demerits and other penalties for drivers will be in effect from Friday midnight through the end of the King's Birthday long weekend, as police ramp up public holiday crackdowns. The double-demerit system will come into effect in NSW from 12.01am on Friday, June 6, and end at 11.59pm on Monday, June 9 for speeding, illegal use of mobile phones, not wearing a seatbelt and riding without a motorcycle helmet. Police may also give additional demerit points if certain driving and parking offences are committed in a school zone. The ACT will also implement a similar double-demerit point system, with a single extra demerit point for all other traffic offences. Victoria Police is cracking down on dangerous driving behaviour over the long weekend, with the road safety blitz – Operation Regal – launching on Friday. Police say the number of lives lost on the road has surged to a 16-year high, with 37 fatalities recorded just in May. There have been 136 lives have been lost on Victorian roads this year, up by 14 per cent on the same time last year Road Policing Command Acting Assistant Commissioner David Byrt said the amount of road trauma the team had experienced halfway into the year had been 'extremely concerning'. 'Whether you're travelling across the state this weekend or heading to the alpine regions, please take extra care on the roads and be sure to drive to the conditions,' he said. 'We'll be highly visible and enforcing across the state's roads this long weekend, cracking down on any dangerous driving behaviour that puts other road users at risk.' Police have warned that speeding and distracted motorists will be their key focus over the King's Birthday long weekend, which has been identified as a high-risk period on Victoria's roads. Major arterials and highways leading to holiday hotspots will be targeted, including the alpine areas, with the snow season expected to begin from this weekend onwards. Drivers and motorists are also urged to avoid driving while impaired, as drug and alcohol testing will be conducted anywhere and at any time. 'We're appealing to everyone to make road safety their No.1 priority every time they get behind the wheel or are out using our roads to eliminate this unnecessary and avoidable trauma,' Mr Byrt said. 'We'll be highly visible and enforcing across the state's roads this long weekend, cracking down on any dangerous driving behaviour that puts other road users at risk.' Other states like South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory will not be imposing a double-demerit scheme for the long weekend, but road safety campaigns will be conducted. Tasmania Police has warned drivers and pedestrians to exercise safety and caution during Hobart's Dark Mofo musical festival, which kicks off on Friday. 'This year already, three pedestrians have died on Tasmanian roads, with a further 14 seriously injured,' Inspector John Toohey said. 'We're asking everyone to stay alert, avoid distractions such as phones or headphones and only cross at designated crossings. 'With many festival events taking place at night and in lowlight conditions, we're hoping to see responsible behaviour; that is, people looking out for each other, obeying traffic signals and being visible in the dark.'
Sky News AU
6 days ago
- Automotive
- Sky News AU
Double demerit points come into force: Everything motorists need to know for the King's Birthday long weekend
Double demerit points will kick in from Friday across parts of the country for the King's Birthday long weekend, as police come out in force to crack down on road safety. Police are urging motorists to take extra care while driving over the next couple of days, as the number of lives lost on Australian roads continue to climb. While double demerit point schemes differ depending on the state or territory, police will be rolling out patrols to ensure road rules are being followed. Here's everything motorists need to know this long weekend. New South Wales In New South Wales, double demerit points will come into effect from 12am on Friday and remain in place until 11.59pm on Monday. Police will be targeting speeding drivers and motorcycle riders, as well as motorists who hit the roads under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Officers will also crackdown on fatigue and distracted driving in a bid to prevent road trauma throughout the long weekend. Victoria Victorian police have revealed the number of lives lost has already surged to a "16-year high", with 135 deaths on the state's roads so far in 2025 - a 13 per cent increase on this period in 2024. The last time Victoria recorded a similar road toll was in 2008 when 137 lives were lost. Victoria has also suffered its worst May on record since 2004, with 36 deaths recorded this year. Police have warned "speeding and distracted motorists will be a key focus" this public holiday long weekend, which is considered to be a "high-risk period" on the state's roads. The road safety blitz, dubbed Operation Regal, will start at 12.01am on Friday and end at 11.59pm on Monday. While Victoria does not enforce a double demerit point scheme, police stressed 7,000 road and traffic infringements were handed out on the same weekend last year. Road Policing Command Acting Assistant Commissioner David Byrt highlighted winter presents extra challenges for motorists given the roads are often slippery and there is poor visibility. "Whether you're travelling across the state this weekend or heading to the alpine regions, please take extra care on the roads and be sure to drive to the conditions," he said in a statement. "We're approaching the halfway point of the year and the amount of trauma we've experienced is extremely concerning. "These road trauma numbers of course represent actual people. People who have been killed, or whose lives are changed forever, simply from travelling on our roads." South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory do not impose a double demerit point scheme. All states will enjoy a long weekend for the King's Birthday, with the popular Dark Mofo musical festival also underway in Tasmania from Friday. Hobart Police Inspector John Toohey has asked motorists to be mindful of vulnerable road users, like pedestrians, during busy event periods. "This year already, three pedestrians have died on Tasmanian roads, with a further 14 seriously injured," he said in a statement ahead of the long weekend. "We're asking everyone to stay alert, avoid distractions such as phones or headphones, and only cross at designated crossings. "With many festival events taking place at night and in low-light conditions, we're hoping to see responsible behaviour, that is, people looking out for each other, obeying traffic signals and being visible in the dark." The ACT The double demerit points penalty will apply in the Australian Capital Territory this long weekend. Queensland Queensland does not observe the King's Birthday in June, as the public holiday is held on October 6. The state's double demerit point scheme operates a little differently to other jurisdictions, as the penalty applies to motorists who repeatedly commit specific offences in a 12-month period. "This doesn't just apply during holiday periods, but at any time of the year," the Queensland government website has stated. While it is not a long weekend in Queensland, motorists are always encouraged to take care as normal road rules apply. Western Australia Similarly to Queensland, Western Australia does not mark the King's Birthday until later in the year in late September. Therefore, double demerit points are not in effect this weekend.
