The Rites of When: When the time seems rite for renewal

Paris-based artist Angelica Mesiti’s seven-channel video and sound installation is centred around the idea of seasonal renewal in a changing world.

Audio-visual artist Angelica Mesiti with her The Rites of When exhibition in the new underground The Tank space at the Art Gallery of NSW. Picture: John Feder

Angelica Mesiti is used to her ­audiences giving themselves over to their most primal senses, but it’s rare that an exhibition space meets her halfway.

The Paris-based Australian artist and The Tank – the marquee exhibition space and former oil reservoir at the Art Gallery of NSW’s Sydney Modern – will come together on Saturday when Mesiti’s The Rites of When opens to the public.

“You can still smell the oil for a few seconds when you come out of the elevator,” Mesiti says.

“Once you are in the space, other senses take over.”

The Tank, a disused navy fuel reservoir built during World War II, was repurposed as part of the $400m Sydney Modern expansion of the Art Gallery of NSW in 2022. Mesiti’s will be only the ­second major exhibition in the subterranean 2200sq m space, following Adrian Villar Rojas’s dark sculptural installation The End of Imagination.

Mesiti says she hopes the historic redolence of the former oil tank will add to audience experiences of her monumental work The Rites of When, a seven-­channel video and sound installation centred around the idea of seasonal renewal in a changing world.

“The fact that (The Tank) was a reservoir for fossil fuel for the purpose of conflict is an interesting notion,” she says. “(The work) explores change that is happening rapidly before us. It asks: ‘How do we find a way to reconnect to the seasons and be more in tune with the natural world?’ ”

The audiovisual work comprises two choreographed dance movements that correspond to the winter and summer solstices. Each movement, Mesiti says, acknowledges the correlation between astronomical observation and seasonal rituals.

The artist, a former professional dancer, worked with French choreographer Filipe Lourenco to create the work.

Mesiti, who won the Blake Prize in 2009 and who was Australia’s representative at the Venice Biennale in 2019, says her latest work also explores humanity’s relationship to the universe. A particular focus is the Pleiades star cluster, a celestial grouping whose appearance historically marked harvest celebrations. “I learned that many cultures across the globe have stories related to the Pleiades … and it made me think how, historically, our ancestors have been led by these celestial events,” she says.

The overarching theme of her work is the “idea of what it means to live on Earth in relation to the greater cosmos”, she adds.

Audiences can expect the installation will be “strongly driven by sound”.

“The Tank has this reverberation, a very specific acoustic,” Mesiti says, adding she has drawn on the talents of female singing group La Mossa, who were “trained in traditional Mediterranean folkloric singing … from agricultural and pastoral traditions”.

Mesiti says the Tank also evokes a spirit of nostalgia that transcends the natural cycles of equinox and harvest and the communal rituals that inspired the artwork.

“(The Tank) reminded me of the abandoned industrial spaces that used to host underground raves in the late ’90s,” she says. “En masse dancing, losing yourself in the music with your friends in a crowd of people.”

She says she hopes those feelings will resonate with viewers as dance scenes from solstice carnivals and harvest festivals are played across the work’s seven large-scale screens.

“I’m really interested in collective modes of celebration and those moments of coming together,” she says. “What I am trying to do with this work is take an honest look at the contemporary moment we are living in and how communal singing and dancing (informs life in the 21st century).”