In the bright upper levels of the Art Gallery of NSW’s new building in Sydney, artist Angelica Mesiti leads me down a wide, white spiral staircase into an art space called ‘The Tank’. She is the second artist to exhibit in this dark, cavernous basement, once an oil storage tank during WWII, with beams stretching from the floor to the ceiling and a lingering, oily smell in the air.
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02-04, 2025The only light in the room comes from bright video screens arranged around the perimeter, displaying Mesiti’s latest compelling artwork, ‘The Rites of When’. Currently based in Paris, Mesiti is one of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, whose work has been shown at major institutions around the world, and who represented Australia at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 2019.
Her immersive, sensory-rich artworks are often presented on multiple large video screens, filled with stories and sound. Her video work, ‘The Calling’ (2014, ACMI) took audiences to a village in northern Turkey where residents communicate across the hillsides using a traditional whistling language. In her latest work, audiences are surrounded by dance and song, which re-imagines rituals associated with seasonal cycles, set against a backdrop of environmental uncertainty.
“A lot of the time my work involves music, dance, group performance and collective playing as a way to think about who we are and how we exist today,” says Mesiti. Her latest powerful work initially stemmed from ideas and observations she recorded in her phone’s notes app. She likens her creative process to that of a bowerbird, collecting things, “and then you start to see patterns emerge,” she says.
In a new series for ABC Arts, ‘Spark: Igniting the Art’, we ask leading artists about their sources of inspiration and what drives their creativity. For Mesiti, inspiration “comes from being in the outside world” – her daily experiences, her observations on the street, what she’s reading, or the exhibitions she sees. “(As an artist) it’s really important to stay curious and to notice things… to walk through the world with all your receptors open, letting things in,” says Mesiti.
“Whenever I travel, I like to see if there are second-hand markets. There are so many great markets in Paris, and also in Korea and Georgia,” says Mesiti. “I find it really interesting to see the everyday objects from other countries and what people hold onto. They’re often not things of high value. It’s like an everyday museum.” One such item she discovered in a flea market in Rome became the inspiration for her work ‘Assembly’, which was shown in the Australian pavilion at Venice. It was a machine called a Michela. She was fascinated by it because it looked like a musical instrument, but was actually a typewriter. It was a stenotype machine used for recording the spoken word, used in the Italian parliament.
“I liked that it was a strange hybrid, between a musical instrument and a keyboard, but also played a role in the democratic process. I thought if you could write with this instrument, then the writing could also be music,” explains Mesiti. So, in ‘Assembly’, they used the machine to type out a poem by David Malouf, which is about language, migration and the lack of a common language. They recorded the notes used when writing the poem, and these notes then became a musical score played by multiple instruments.
“Since I’ve been in Paris, I’ve been taking the metro, and I’ve noticed how much it’s changed in the decade. Now people are mostly looking at their phones,” says Mesiti. “The metro is kind of like a microcosm of everything that’s happening in a city in the same space. By observing what’s happening on the metro you get a good sense of what kind of people inhabit a place. My work so far has been about city life and experience, like populations and communities colliding and having to live parallel lives. All the beauty and tension that comes from that is a big and interesting idea for me.”
“There are a lot of street performers on the metro. That’s how I met Mohamed (an Algerian musician in Paris), who appears in my work ‘Citizen’s Band’ (2012) – he got on the metro one day, and it became the trigger for me to make that whole work,” says Mesiti. ‘Citizen’s Band’ is a work where four people perform different music or gestures related to their cultural origins, but the performances all take place against the backdrop of the cities they’ve migrated to (Paris and Sydney).
“Mohamed is an incredible performer. He’s visually impaired, and he has this beautiful, untrained, quite raw voice, but he also plays a Casio keyboard that he has on his shoulder, and he plays it almost like a violin. He sings Arabic translations of familiar songs – he even does a cover of ‘Hotel California’. It’s very unusual and visually striking. I’d never seen anyone do that before, I was captivated,” says Mesiti.
“Since I was a kid I’ve loved to dance. I’m really interested in why humans dance. It’s something we’ve been doing since the beginning of time, and it feels like one of our basic human needs,” says Mesiti. “Dance has never been far from many of my projects. I use the word ‘dance’ quite broadly – it can also mean gesture. ‘The Rites of When’ is trying to re-imagine traditional folk dances – you might think of people holding hands, dancing around a fire, a kind of rural circle dance. There’s actually a lot of historical evidence that it’s one of the earliest dances that humans have performed.”
“We re-imagine it for a contemporary context – young people dancing in parkas, Doc Martens and Adidas in a car park in Paris. The final scene refers to a ball or club environment, people losing themselves in the music,” explains Mesiti. “My ancestors are from Southern Italy. My grandparents both migrated from Calabria, and lived in Europe, and I sometimes travel to Italy in the summer – we have friends and family there. A lot of the works are inspired by these trips.”
“In the summer, especially in the south, there are a lot of big festivals around Catholic saints. There will be processions through the streets… they’re both celebratory and solemn, and I think that’s really interesting – the exuberance that Italians express, but also with a very solemn, guilt-ridden Catholic side. It feels like it belongs to another time. It’s a deep tradition that has always fascinated me,” says Mesiti. ‘The Rites of When’ features processions and circle dances, which are very much influenced by my heritage and my experiences in Southern Italy – many of these traditions are also found across the Mediterranean and Southern Europe.
“I started going to Paris with my Australian performance group, the Kingpins, from 2006/07. On one of those trips I met my husband. I applied for a residency in Paris, and then started making work there… it just kind of evolved. It wasn’t a big life plan to move to Paris one day, it just happened,” says Mesiti. “I started to put down roots around 2012. For me, Paris has been a really nourishing place to be an artist. There are museums and so much access to contemporary and historical art – but I think also there is a deep respect for artists in France.”
“I remember when I first got there, I got married to my partner… we had a civil ceremony, and the officiant said, ‘Artists will always be welcome in this city’. And I thought, ‘What?’ I don’t know if that would be part of a ceremony anywhere else. I’ve always felt that it’s a nourishing place for artists – even in its economic structures, it’s very supportive,” says Mesiti. “And Paris itself is a fascinating city. The French are very committed to demonstrating for their rights and their beliefs. I’m really inspired by the way they mobilize en masse publicly. It’s really influenced my artistic life.”
For example, the work ‘Assembly’ is a choreography based on gestures that Parisians developed during demonstrations… a way of expressing your agreement or disagreement with a speaker, in a way that doesn’t interrupt the speaker. They’re also related to sign language. So that’s a direct influence. “I think living in a place that’s not your culture and language really shapes you,” says Mesiti. “The language you speak affects the way you think – your thoughts are different because things are expressed differently… you kind of straddle two languages, two cultural experiences. I like being in two places at once.”
Angelica Mesiti: ‘The Rites of When’ is showing in the Neilson Park Tank at the Art Gallery of NSW’s Nala Badu building until May 11, 2025.
