Hobart

Tasmania’s winter festival has this year excelled its usual weird.

Timed to coincide with the winter solstice, Dark Mofo explores ancient and contemporary attitudes towards darkness and light, birth, death and renewal.

Hosted by the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), the June festival features exhibitions, large-scale public art, film, music, nocturnal events, a communal feast, nude swim, and ‘‘ogoh ogoh’’ parade past ceremonial fires. The evening parade sees festivalgoers offer up their fears to the Tasmanian cave spidershaped ogoh-ogoh – a demon-like figure derived from Balinese Hindu culture. The ogohogoh, and the fears it has been endowed with, then go up in flames.

Australian performance artist Mike Parr, 73, made international headlines this year after spending three days buried beneath a busy street in a steel box, in a memorial to the victims of 20th century totalitarian violence.