Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Underground, in the decommissioned fuel bunker of the Tank gallery, a polyphonic and percussive chant rises over scenes from an urban car park. There’s a crackling bonfire, a burning donkey effigy and popping fireworks.
The Paris-based Australian video artist Angelica Mesiti has reimagined a winter solstice celebration for the 21st century in the first act of a monumental video and sound installation commissioned by the Art Gallery of NSW. “My proposition is we are living in urban spaces, very distanced from shifts in the seasons and the fiction in the work is about a time and place where we reimagine traditions that help us connect back to nature,” Mesiti says. Since opening in December 2022, the Tank gallery has hosted the fantastical alien-like sculptures of Argentinian Adrian Villar Rojas and the spinning spiders and strung anatomical forms of Louise Bourgeois.
A video still from Angelica Mesiti’s The Rites of When (2024). Credit: Angelica Mesiti Mesiti is the first Australian artist commissioned to present for the gallery’s answer to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London. “When I first encountered the Tank, I was really taken by the scale, but more importantly, the acoustic nature of the space,” Mesiti says.
“I was really interested in the way that the reverberation and echo was such an inherent quality of the architecture. “It reminded me of other environments like.