The Unconformity, lutruwita/Tasmania’s biennial contemporary cultural festival, which is deeply rooted in and reflective of the distinctive West Coast town of Queenstown where it takes place, returns from Thursday 16 to Sunday 19 October 2025.
The festival’s 2025 edition will be its first without founding Artistic Director Travis Tiddy (who stepped down from the role in August 2024 after 15 years and seven festivals) and, consequently, marks the beginning of a new chapter for The Unconformity under the joint leadership of CEO Louisa Gordon and Artistic Director Loren Kronemyer.
Program details are yet to be announced, but Gordon says she and the festival team are ‘thrilled to invite audiences back to the West Coast in 2025 for an experience unlike any other’.
The Unconformity – named after a local geological feature, a break in the geological record – is set amid Queenstown’s dramatic peaks and barren ‘moonscape’ hills, which only now are slowly revegetating, after being stripped bare due to a combination of deforestation and the acid rain produced by years of copper extraction and smelting at the town’s Mount Lyell Mine, which closed in 1994.
‘The Unconformity is a festival that moves at the pace of Queenstown, powerfully and deeply connected to place. It offers a moment of reconnection in a remote part of the world that has always defied convention,’ Gordon explains.
The 2025 festival promises to once again transform Queenstown while also highlighting the town’s unique environment through headline acts, site-specific installations, contemporary performances, participatory works, live music and cross-cultural exchange, all compellingly attuned to the landscape and community that shape them.
The Unconformity is rooted in collaboration and cultural dialogue and co-created in partnership with local residents, deeply connected artists, Aboriginal community members and visitors statewide and nationally, offering a rare opportunity to encounter art that is not only seen but lived. Many of the major works in each edition of the festival to date were commissioned by The Unconformity, and were often developed by artists making repeat visits to Queenstown to ensure both local connection and a concrete connection to place.
Read: Festival review: The Unconformity, Queenstown (2024)
Artistic Director Loren Kronemyer says of the festival’s upcoming edition: ‘Grounded in place, The Unconformity is an evolving conversation between the inhabitants of this ecosystem. Our 2025 program reflects the unique spirit of Queenstown: independent, poetic and generous. We can’t wait to share what’s taking shape.’
Expect the unexpected in terms of programming, weather and experiences – previous editions of The Unconformity have seen dancers plunge into the town’s sulphur-stained, biologically dead river in a performance choreographed by Minjungbal, Wiradjuri and Ni-Vanuatu man Thomas E S Kelly and produced by Tasdance, while audiences watched on from a bridge above, and a communal ascent of Mount Owen, overlooking Queenstown, designed to connect participants with the landscape while also evoking a sense of community connection.
The festival has also featured ephemeral artworks that encouraged audiences to cut and carry away pieces of the work, sound art experienced via kayak on the man-made reservoir Lake Burbury, art exhibitions in the former Mount Lyell Mine’s offices, the ‘aestheticisiation of industry’ through dance performances in a functional sawmill and live music played in a former limestone quarry.
In 2025, The Unconformity invites audiences to grow their own connections with the land, with stories and with one another through newly commissioned works. Festival favourites also return, including the dawn hike Unrise, The Unconformity Art Trail and The Unconformity Cup – the infamous aesthetes versus athletes all-gender AFL match played on Queenstown’s infamous gravel oval – billed as ‘the most infamous and feared football field in Australia’ – as the culmination of four days of festivities.
The full program for The Unconformity 2025 will be available online from Friday 22 August 2025. Visitors are encouraged to plan their journey and book accommodation early.
