Photograph: Jesse Hunnifordīut court risk long enough and boundaries blur. Risk was in the ticket.Īn Ogoh-Ogoh is carried through a parade to The Burning, at 2018’s Dark Mofo. By then Dark Mofo had trained me to believe a man being buried alive under a road was business as usual. Looking down on the scene I wasn’t so sure. “If anything had’ve gone wrong,” said the festival’s creative director, Leigh Carmichael, on the night the bitumen was peeled back for Parr to emerge, “that’s it, the festival’s over.” In 2018, then 73-year-old artist Mike Parr entombed himself under Macquarie Street for three days. And all whispers upon which Dark Mofo built an empire, as it lodged itself as Australia’s most consistently challenging and rewarding cultural event. Risk was part of the ticket.Īll spectacular artworks of varying success. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.Īfter newsletter promotion A man being buried alive under a road was business as usual. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. That year it was the animal rights protesters who made the festival’s now customary headlines – although none blinked at the pig on a spit roasting at the nearby Winter Feast. Action unfolded into a mesmerising, three-hour performance of gore, nudity and intense physical ritual. In 2017 I watched animal blood trickle between the audience’s shoes, as Hermann Nitsch’s 150. The following year a letter to the editor decried the festival for subjecting children to “a demonic and satanic culture”. In 2015 I cowered at Byron Scullin’s Bass Bath – a double-story tower of speakers in a pitch-black warehouse thudding a constellation of frequencies designed to ripple your insides. That work, ZEE, by Austrian artist Kurt Hentschlager, remains one of the most perplexing, frightening and elating of my life. I’ve signed a waiver on a trestle table and walked into a room of impenetrable fog, to lose all spatial awareness in a hail of strobing coloured pixels blasting my sight – even with eyes closed. Over the festival’s 10 years I’ve flown hungover in a hot-air balloon basket under Patricia Piccinini’s Skywhale, marvelling at the “degrading and offensive” beast’s pendulous breasts swinging in the breeze. I’ve been a guest covering every Dark Mofo since it began in 2013 – with the exception of 2021 when I was stuck in Victoria’s lockdown. Had that just happened?īack inside the party I tried to explain to my friends. She handed me a Polaroid of myself sitting on equipment in a gym – the black gimp looming over my shoulder. Just the girl in the white jumpsuit alone on the footpath outside the party. After being kidnapped at Dark Mofo, Marcus Teague was left with this Polaroid.
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