Main image: The Rites of When (2024) features dancers silhouetted against colours evocative of a changing sky
—by Neha Kale
In a landmark commission for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Paris-based artist Angelica Mesiti channels the power of ancestral ritual to imagine another world. Here she offers us a glimpse into her distinctive vision.
Angelica Mesiti has long observed the power of collective ritual to connect the present with the past. The internationally renowned artist recently became interested in an asterism of stars called Pleiades, best known in Australia as the Seven Sisters. Mythology around Pleiades, she learned, has appeared across different cultures throughout history, dating back to ancient Greece. As she delved into the subject, Mesiti started thinking about the way past generations—from Indigenous Australians to her own southern Italian ancestors— looked to the sky when the seasons changed; how the movement of the stars could, itself, spark occasions to gather. It was this notion that gave rise to her new work, a major commission for the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) entitled The Rites of When.
“Pleiades is one of the most visible star clusters with the naked eye,” Mesiti explains. “It emerges on the horizon around September/October, when in the northern hemisphere it’s the beginning of autumn and in the southern hemisphere, it’s spring. Many cultures talk about it in relation to renewal. I started thinking about [how] seasons have played such a huge role in our annual cycles for humankind and that, in earlier times, [they] were marked by these social, communal events.” Pausing for a moment to reflect on this, she adds: “We’ve all been noticing our seasons changing, experiencing weather patterns that are unusual and there’s a feeling that there’s something off-balance.”
Mesiti is speaking to The Luxury Report from Paris, having relocated from Sydney in 2012. It is high summer in Europe and behind her, there is a wash of dappled light through the window. With her curly, chin-length hair and crisp blue shirt, Mesiti appears in the laptop frame as if in portrait. She has an elegant, otherworldly quality. She weighs her thoughts carefully, considering each word, each sentence. She is attentive to the way that language is not always the most reliable carrier of meaning; that when we talk, we are often subject to mistranslation. “I didn’t [speak] any French when I moved here,” she admits. “When you’re in the situation where you’re outside the familiarity of your native tongue, you have to [be] understood and try to understand others.”
The 47-year-old artist has spent the past 20 years making hypnotic video installations that map non-verbal terrain. She is interested in the choreography of everyday life; how we invent and imagine new ways to communicate. In 2009 she won the prestigious Blake Prize for Religious Art—becoming the first video artist to do so—for her work Rapture (Silent Anthem). The work depicted teenagers filmed in a mosh pit close-up, their faces beaded with sweat, their bodies united in a fandom reminiscent of spiritual worship. A decade later, she would represent Australia at the 58th Venice Biennale, the highest honour for an artist, with ASSEMBLY. The three-channel installation, part of a presentation at the Australian Pavilion curated by Juliana Engberg, took cues from protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street. In the same year she was honoured with a solo show at the Palais De Tokyo in Paris.
“I think what I’ve become aware of since making ASSEMBLY is the fact that nothing is sure,” she says. “Nothing is certain, things that we thought were impossible [in 2019] have happened.” To make ASSEMBLY, the artist used a stenographic machine (discovered at a Roman flea market) to transcribe To Be Written in Another Tongue, a poem by Australian novelist David Malouf in which he struggles to interpret the language of his grandfather. The poem becomes the basis of a musical score by Australian composer Max Lyandvert, performed by over 40 musicians and dancers from various traditions. In one scene, a woman plays a clarinet. In another, Lebanese percussionists gallop across the screen, their drumbeats exuberant. The work, filmed at Australia’s Old Parliament House and the Italian Senate in Rome’s Palazzo Madama, meditates on the fragility of democracy. But it is also about the human desire to come together, to find commonality amid difference. “In the Italian community we were always going to weddings,” Mesiti laughs. “I understand now why there were hundreds of people there.”
Mesiti in the Tank.
Image: Jenni Carter.
Mesiti grew up in Sydney, the daughter of second-generation Italian migrants. “Like so many of us, I came from a family where there was one way of being at school, another way of being at home,” she says. “[There] are these different selves that we present. We become fluid, shifting between them.” Her first love, she says, was dance—a form in which the body is the highest tool of expression. While on a dance scholarship at the Laban Centre in London, one of Europe’s foremost institutions for contemporary dance, Mesiti learned to read music. Then, in the early noughties, after undertaking a Bachelor of Fine Arts at UNSW, the artist became a founding member of all-female performance group The Kingpins.
During this era, Mesiti says she became galvanised by the exchanges that could take place between audience and performer. “This unique thing can happen in the moment when you’re all joined together,” she says. “I had some amazing mentors who introduced me to feminist thinking and The Kingpins felt strongly about challenging expectations. I became interested in who was being left out.”
Set in then-affordable Surry Hills, Imperial Slacks, the artist-run performance space where Mesiti and a group of other emerging artists lived, worked and exhibited during this time, sparked the collaborative mode of artmaking that would become a hallmark of her career. “We were living together, working together, creating together,” she recalls. “I loved being surrounded by other creative people. The kinds of ideas that could emerge out of group thinking really appealed to me.”
Her installations are polyphonic affairs, involving collaboration with cinematographers, choreographers and recordists. Her best works draw on sound and moving image to tune the audience into unseen frequencies, cultivating an awareness of an invisible resonance that connects us. In Citizen’s Band (2012), Mesiti follows four migrants who have adapted their musical lineage for their new countries. Geraldine, a Cameroonian woman in Paris, taps her fingers on the surface of a public pool, carrying out akutuk, a practice of water drumming. A Mongolian throat singer called Bukhchuluun busks on a Sydney street corner. Asim, a Sudanese taxi driver, whistles an improvised tune in Brisbane. Private memories manifest here as public rituals, and in the end their soundtracks meld together, playing out as a polyphony. “I’m reading a book at the moment called Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy [by Barbara Ehrenreich]. It’s interested in the ways that gathering communally over the ages has been such an important aspect of forging bonds,” Mesiti explains. “Researchers I’ve read say that music, dance and song are the central functions of a spiritual experience. These ideas still interest me.” In 2014 Mesiti won the inaugural Ian Potter Moving Image Commission for The Calling. To create the work she travelled to Kuskoy in Northern Turkey, La Gomera in The Canary Islands and the Greek island of Evia to observe the whistling languages that have been used in these parts of the world for generations; non-verbal forms of communication that allow communities to convey messages over vast distances. “This language developed very closely alongside the environmental terrain of these communities,” she says. “They are very much linked with how these groups of people were living in their landscape, among other species. Most of them had shepherd practices that were integral to their agrarian lifestyle.” She continues: “It’s about humans in their environment, humans living alongside other species and a functional method of communication that—despite the technological advances around it— has managed to survive and adapt.”
A hundred years (2024), a haunting film commissioned for the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, revisits the landscapes of the Somme in northern France, the site of the western front of the first world war. The film charts the ways in which nature has reclaimed culture, erasing the trace of human history. “The work focused on battlefields that have been preserved as memorial sites,” explains Mesiti. “Some of them have returned to their function prior to the war, as forests or parklands or fields of wheat. I was interested in this seasonal regeneration as a hopeful idea.”
For Mesiti’s first solo exhibition at the AGNSW, The Rites of When will unfold as a large-scale video and sound installation in the Tank, the 2200sqm subterranean bunker beneath the gallery’s north building that was originally built to store oil during the second world war. “The scale [of the space] has a real effect on the body,” she says. “It reminded me of experiences I had of being in the Duomo in Milan and sacred architecture that references natural spaces like forests.”
For AGNSW senior curator Beatrice Gralton, The Rites of When invites viewers to become attuned to the landscape. “It has been a privilege to witness Mesiti ‘play’ the Tank [like] an instrument, tuning into its particular sonic and architectural qualities,” she remarks. “This work is a reminder to listen—to our environment, our bodies and to each other.”
The artist says The Rites of When revolves around the collective rituals that have always accompanied the seasons. Contained within its seven channels are movements that evoke the winter and summer solstices. “There’s the harvest, which coincides with the solstice and the equinox,” she explains. “It would call people together and there was singing involved. Fire has a new meaning to us because of the unprecedented rise of bushfires.”
In one still, a figure is adorned with a horse-head mask as flames explode in the background. Elsewhere, a performer stands on another’s shoulders as if in awe of a sky that ripples a radiant blue and purple.
The work references the Nebra disc, a Bronze Age star map that is also one of the earliest known depictions of Pleiades. Here, the constellation— beamed to us from light years away— is a reminder to look upward, outward towards the cosmos that was a salve for those who came before us. The world, now, is in crisis. “Now we look up and there are satellites moving, there are planes,” Mesiti says. “But our myth-making, our origin stories are all in the sky.”
The Rites of When, then, is about the power of collective artistry. When she makes her installations, Mesiti often acts as an observer, documenting those she performs with. But this work, she believes, represents a leap for her as an artist. For the first time, she is working with her collaborators to imagine another world. “I feel now, for me, it is more interesting to invent through research rather than set frames around existing situations,” she says. “I think imagination has become more important than observation for the moment.”
The Rites of When is exhibited until 11 May 2025.
