Warrane/Sydney was experiencing a perfect day in the Domain parklands, all warm sun on cool grass lawns and fig trees. In two days it would be the spring equinox, the tipping point from shorter winter to longer summer days.
But below, in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ subterranean Tank gallery, it was about to be winter. And then summer – all within a half hour.
This was the first screening of The Rites of When: an immersive audiovisual installation by the Paris-based Australian artist Angelica Mesiti, best known for representing Australia at the Venice Biennale in 2019. More than four years in the making, it’s the second major commission for the converted oil reservoir beneath the gallery’s new building, after an installation of dystopian sculptures by the Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas.
The Tank has hosted a number of high-profile projects since it opened in December 2022, including a Louise Bourgeois exhibition, an audiovisual installation by the visual artist Jonathan Zawada and the musician Flume, and sets by Solange and André 3000. But in The Rites of When it has met its match: an artwork so meticulously conceived and constructed for this idiosyncratic space that it couldn’t exist elsewhere.
Sound is a massive part of this. As Mesiti said at the media preview on Friday: “This space rings like a bell. It has this resonance that is very rare, that might be found in a cathedral or in a deep cave. So it’s kind of an instrument, in a way.”
She put the venue through rigorous sonic tests, which guided a bespoke soundtrack that includes polyphonic vocal music (by the all-female French ensemble La Mòssa), body percussion of clicking, claps and stomps (working with the choreographer Filipe Lourenço) and electronic music (by the producer and club DJ Chloé Thévenin).
The Tank has never sounded so good – and it sets a high bar for future projects.
Visually, The Rites of When is often equally ravishing – albeit in a way that will confound Instagrammers (and even professional photographers) in their efforts to capture it. It starts in the stars: images of the swirling, star-spangled galaxy on seven monolithic vertical screens are arranged in a circle within the 2,200-sq-metre space. Over the next 34 minutes we travel down to Earth and through the snow-tipped pine forests of a European winter, then soar drone-like above sun-scorched summer wheatfields before watching them burn.
The work is divided into two movements, the first inspired by the hibernal (winter) equinox and the second by the aestival (summer) equinox. The changeover between seasons is heralded by a street procession and circle dance that harks back to the midwinter solstice carnivals of southern Europe – including specific references to community celebrations that Mesiti attended growing up in north-western Sydney as the grandchild of Calabrian migrant farmers.
We end with a rave, and supersized dancers churning slo-mo through strobe lighting on the screens around us. There’s an ecstatic release at the climax before we start over for another cycle.
Mesiti was commissioned in January 2020; whatever dreams she might have had initially, the reality of the Covid pandemic profoundly shaped the final work. During lockdown she decamped to rural France, where she developed a new appreciation for the seasonal cycles of farming and the nightly starscapes, untrammelled by the light pollution of Paris. She learned that since ancient times societies across the world have used the Pleiades constellation (known in many Aboriginal cultures as the Seven Sisters) to mark the changing seasons and harvest cycles.
With front-row seats to the vicissitudes of the climate crisis on agriculture, and a telescope pointed not only at the stars but at the miasma of human-made space junk surrounding the Earth, Mesiti thought about how our relationship to nature has been warped across time, by industry and technology.
The resulting work tilts from the unsettling present-day reality – the unnervingly neat, human-made forest, grown simply to be felled; the vast wheatfields, like a tinderbox in our too-hot summers – into utopian visions of rituals for a future in which we are “retuned” to the natural world.
The vastness of the cosmos and those epic landscapes are counterbalanced by the human rituals and the sense that we are part of something communal – surrounded by a circle of performers on the screens, and together with other audience members in a space that is like both a forest and a cathedral, with its lofty seven-metre ceiling and grid of 125 supporting columns.
Within the work, certain sequences are stronger than others (the futuristic summer ritual is perhaps too withholding – sonically and choreographically) and as a whole “narrative” it doesn’t feel cohesive or propulsive enough to easily hold audiences’ attention for the full 34 minutes (the gallery suggests viewers watch it start to finish).
But, at its best, its confluence of choreography, sound and vision approaches the sublime – and nails the brief of creating an ecstatic ritual to meet our apocalyptic times.
Angelica Mesiti: The Rites of When runs until 11 May 2025 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales/Naala Badu
