University of Tasmania
Browse
132721 - Where Art Meets Life.pdf (665.67 kB)

Where 'art meets life': assessing the impact of Dark Mofo, a new mid-winter festival in Australia

Download (665.67 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-20, 03:45 authored by Adrian FranklinAdrian Franklin
In Hobart, a litany of winter festivals flopped and failed until the arrival of Mona (Museum of Old and New Art), a private museum owned by mathematician, successful online gambler, and autodidact David Walsh. Since 2013, its new festival, Dark Mofo, not only has reignited long-somnolent traditions of midwinter festival imaginaries among its postcolonial society but also has proved to be an effective vehicle for galvanizing an all-of-community form of urban activation, engagement, and regeneration. It has also completely overwhelmed the city with visitors keen to participate in a no-holds-barred ritual week with major global artists and musicians keen to be on its carnivalesque platforms. While Mona has explored grotesque realism themes of sex, death, and the body in its darkened, labyrinthine and subterranean levels, Dark Mofo has permitted their mix of carnivalesque and Dionysian metaphors and embodied practices/politics to take over the entire city in a week of programmatic mischief and misrule at midwinter. Research by an Australian Research Council–funded study of Mona and its festive register will be used to account for its origins and innovation as well as its social, cultural, and economic composition and impact.

History

Publication title

Journal of Festive Studies

Pagination

106-127

ISSN

2641-9939

Department/School

School of Social Sciences

Publisher

H-Net

Place of publication

United States

Rights statement

Copyright 2019 Adrian Franklin. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Socio-cultural issues in tourism