A darker, clearer sky

The Rites of When, 2024, by Angelica Mesiti, is a commissioned sound and video installation in the Tank at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The work contemplates the relationship between humans, nature, and the universe as it manifests through the two solstices, which commemorate the longest night and the longest day of the year.

The Tank, located in the northern extension of the Art Gallery of NSW, was originally an underground oil reservoir used during the Second World War. It is one of two that were built to fuel the naval fleet at Garden Island. Repurposed now as a gallery space, it is a vast 2,200 square metre underground realm with seven-metre-high ceilings and a faintly pungent forest of 125 oil-stained concrete pillars. It is already a highly sensory space, with its moody subterranean palette, cathedral-like ceilings, and concrete walls all contributing to its acoustic resonance and atmosphere. Angelica Mesiti realises this and has responded with a thoughtful reverence, embracing the site’s dominating features and its sonic quirks with her immersive sound and video installation The Rites of When, 2024.

The work features seven vertical screens, each six metres high by three metres wide, echoing the height of the columns and creating the effect of a flickering forested landscape that you would view on horseback rather than trying to fight through the density of columns to view a single screen. You can follow the imagery by turning to each screen if you wish. Movement is constant. Mesiti has often used dance and choreography in her previous works, as well as music, which features prominently here too—we hear Gregorian chants, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The imagery used is fragmentary and abstract rather than following a traditional linear account, giving the observer glimpses of familiarity rather than a structured chronological narrative.

The screen work runs for thirty-four minutes and begins like some homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, presenting its awe-inspiring cosmic references before dividing into two parts, aerial shots introducing the winter and summer solstices. Winter has a drone tracking above a forest whose trees are neatly spaced like those of the columns in the Tank. Though covered in snow, these are not wild woods but plantation forests to be harvested like the vast wheat fields that feature in the summer sequence. The mid-winter procession takes place in a car park—while the costumes, masks, and fireworks reference the Middle Ages, the scene is geographically undefined, but still evoking a time when life was more tethered and vulnerable to the seasons. I couldn’t help thinking of another film, The Wicker Man, 1973, with its pan pagan ritual celebrations ending in a bonfire. The old ways are seemingly a more fruitful, organic, respectful, and attuned way of existing.

The summer solstice celebration is more obviously choreographed, with a dancer held aloft by peers against a twilight hued backdrop. The promised rain is introduced by the sound of clicking fingers and then clapping before a torrential downpour of hands slapping thighs in a crescendo of body percussion. Each visual sequence begins and ends with a celestial display, with the accompanying sound also orchestrated into movements.

It was not until the end when the seven screens had returned to white that I realised the reflective pieces on the floor were not merely arbitrarily placed but had meaning. If I had come down the spiral staircase first instead of rushing in via the lift to make the beginning of the screening, I would have recognised the pattern of the Bronze Age Nebra sky disc (1600 BCE), found at a prehistoric enclosure encircling the Mittelberg hill south-west of Berlin, Germany. This was now also obviously a reference to the Pleiades star cluster (seven stars are the most visible and often referenced in Indigenous myths throughout the world) along with a crescent moon, random stars, and the sun (or a full moon). I did get to admire it and the overall installation on the way back up the stairs. It is believed by many researchers that the sky disc is the oldest known credible depiction of the cosmos yet and was used as a calculation tool for planting crops, harvesting, and other agricultural activities.

Mesiti’s work has stayed with me long after viewing it and I had much to think about regarding memory, ritual, and place. This in turn enthused me to dig out my collection of the Australian anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner’s (1905–1981) writings. He had worked extensively with Indigenous Australians and was very attuned to the importance of ceremony and ritual. In his 1956 essay The Dreaming he coined the term “everywhen,” explaining “One cannot ‘fix’ The Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen.” It sums up what I enjoyed most about Mesiti’s installation: it offers multiple viewpoints without relentlessly promoting a single, all-consuming perspective.

Exhibition
Angelica Mesiti: The Rites of When
21 September 2024 – 11 May 2025
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

This profile was published in Artist Profile, Issue 70, 2025.
Images courtesy of the artist and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney