Angelica Mesiti The Rites of When

Angelica Mesiti is creating an immersive installation for the former wartime oil bunker beneath Naala Badu, the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ north building.

A rich visual and sonic experience, Angelica Mesiti: The Rites of When is a large-scale video and sound installation that reimagines collective and communal rituals in relation to seasonal cycles, at a time of environmental uncertainty and flux.

Mesiti adapts choreography, vocal choruses, instrumentation and collective sound-making to re-examine activities familiar to communities who have deep bonds with seasonal rhythms. Ecstatic celebrations associated with specific moments in the calendar – notably mid-winter solstice carnivals and mid-summer harvest festivals – are played out across seven monolithic screens, offering a portal into a realm alongside past and present: an imagined alternative.

The Rites of When is also informed by the enduring tradition of depicting, describing and understanding life on Earth by studying the movements of the stars in the night sky. Elements within the Tank reference the prehistoric Nebra sky disc, which contains an early depiction of the Pleiades star cluster. In cultures around the world, this celestial body has been a harbinger of seasonal activity on land and water. The Pleiades provides a symbolic cartography for Mesiti’s installation, a gesture to communal creativity on a global scale.

As cycles of regeneration in nature shift out of sync and people around the globe increasingly live in urbanised environments, removed from nature, The Rites of When explores the possibilities of inventing new rituals and finding adaptive pathways for connection.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated book charting the development of the work.