Media release – DarkLab, 11 March 2025
FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT: DARK MOFO PRESENTS A NEW COMMISSION BY NATHAN MAYNARD
The organisers of Dark Mofo, Australia’s midwinter solstice celebration, which returns in full this June, have today revealed the first work in the 2025 festival. The announcement comes after 6,000 pre-release tickets to festival favourite Night Mass sold out in less than four hours in November, and ahead of the full program release on April 4.
Dark Mofo’s new Artistic Director Chris Twite said, “Taking the year off in 2024 was a difficult decision, but Dark Mofo is back with renewed energy and focus, ready to deliver an enormous program spanning two packed weeks this June.
“We’re grateful for the support of the state government and the continued generosity of David Walsh, which is allowing us to lay the foundation for another incredible decade of Dark Mofo.
“It was encouraging to sell over 6,000 Night Mass tickets in less than 4 hours during our pre-release late last year, indicating that demand for the festival remains strong. We are hoping for a similar response when we release the full program on the 4th April.
“Today we are excited to reveal the first piece of the festival’s massive city wide contemporary art program with a powerful new work by Nathan Maynard.”
Premiering at Dark Mofo in 2025,We threw them down the rocks where they had thrown the sheep is a new commission by multidisciplinary Trawlwoolway artist Nathan Maynard. Locked in a nondescript basement in Nipaluna/Hobart’s CBD, this ambitious work uses flesh to lay bare the legacy of cultural theft and erasure at staggering scale in a mass installation.
Artist Nathan Maynard says: “Languishing in museums and their storerooms are the remains of ancestors of First Nations people from all around our globe. They have been stripped of identity and, without consent, treated like specimens for study and scientific inquiry. We threw them down the rocks where they had thrown the sheep speaks to the sadistic power white institutions flex when they deny first nations people the humanity of putting our ancestor’s remains to rest in the physical and the spiritual.”
Maynard is an award-winning, multidisciplinary artist from Lutruwita/Tasmania, receiving rave reviews for his examinations of race, community, power and identity, most recently as the playwright for 37, presented by the Melbourne Theatre Company. As a visual artist, he has exhibited as part of Hobart Current at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery with Relics Act, a project that saw an Australian man of British descent volunteer his future deceased body and will conclude with a ceremonial act of repatriation. Maynard’s new work for Dark Mofo continues his exploration of remains and reclamation.
Maynard’s installation is the first work to be revealed from the Dark Mofo 2025 program—featuring two weeks of contemporary art, live music, ritual and revelry in the depths of winter—with the full lineup to be revealed on 4 April. Subscribe to the mailing list to receive program updates and access to festival tickets www.darkmofo.net.au.
Dark Mofo will run between 5–15 + 21 June 2025 and is a project of the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), generously supported by the Tasmanian Government through Events Tasmania.
