Dark Mofo

Dark Mofo is Mona's midwinter festival, staged across Hobart each June around the winter solstice. Launched in 2013 as the dark twin of the museum's summer festival Mona Foma, it trades daylight for night-time programming: experimental music, large-scale light and fire installations, ritual, and the Winter Feast. It turned Tasmania's coldest, darkest weeks into the state's biggest cultural drawcard, and its appetite for provocation — inverted crosses on the waterfront, the police-baiting Nude Solstice Swim — is the point, not a side effect. The 2026 edition ran 11–22 June.

Dark Mofo debuted in 2013, conceived by Leigh Carmichael, Mona owner David Walsh and Mona Foma curator Brian Ritchie, partly as a play to pull visitors to Hobart in the dead of winter. The first edition introduced Ryoji Ikeda's Spectra, the vertical beam of light that now rises permanently from Mona's lawns.

Carmichael served as creative director for a decade, stepping down after 2023. Citing rising costs, the festival went on hiatus in 2024, reduced to just the Winter Feast and the Nude Solstice Swim while new artistic director Chris Twite called a "period of renewal".

It returned at full scale in June 2025 and backed that up with the 11–22 June 2026 edition.

The festival's biggest controversy came in 2021, when Spanish artist Santiago Sierra's Union Flag proposed soaking a British flag in blood donated by First Nations people. After sustained criticism from Indigenous artists including Briggs and Kira Puru, and from within Mona itself, Carmichael cancelled the work and conceded he had "made a mistake".

The Nude Solstice Swim — thousands wading into the Derwent at dawn on the solstice — was originally knocked back by police and has since become the festival's defining ritual. The 2024 cancellation made national news as part of the broader Australian festival cost crisis, before the 2025 comeback.