Visual Art
Angelica Mesiti’s installation at the Art Gallery of NSW’s Tank, The Rites of When, is a reminder for times of crisis that there are worlds beyond this one. By Neha Kale.
Angelica Mesiti’s The Rites of When at the Art Gallery of NSW
1. Bands of colour dance and shimmer: hot pink and yellow, lilac and indigo. This is light as material, radiant and undulating. It stretches perception to its limits, commanding its own space. Figures walk into the frame, each step electric with meaning, as if in thrall to something invisible. A single body rises above the group, hoisted on many shoulders. They look upwards and outwards, moving as one organism in the subterranean darkness of the Tank, the wartime oil bunker in the basement of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s northern building, Naala Badu. I watch them watching. The force of their attention is a spectacle in itself.
2. In an essay called “Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard, the writer and her husband, watching the shadow of the moon cross the sun, are lifted, momentarily, out of the rhythms of ordinary life. Awed and awake, they enter another state. They are alive to the “loosened circle of evening sky”. They notice the “wide world swaddled in darkness”. Hours and minutes stop mattering. Time is no longer measured in increments but at the level of the orbit.
On a weekday afternoon, I visit Angelica Mesiti’s The Rites of When, which was commissioned specifically for the Tank. It plays across seven screens that reference the seven stars of the Pleiades, a constellation that you see anywhere in the world, the subject of stories and myths and legends. I, too, am released from the grip of hours and minutes. I start to experience time in a new way.
3. It begins with gas and dust: the glimmers of newborn stars, the milky swirls of a celestial nebulae. Then ice-covered forests, a fairytale landscape as seen by a drone. Sound reverberates through my body, ricochets around the room. For the artist, the soaring ceilings and columns of the Tank recall a cave, a cathedral. Bob Scott’s score, a dirge-like chorus of percussion and clicks, heralds the start of a ritual. Polyphonic chants from the French ensemble, La Mòssa, fill the air.
It’s the longest night of the year, the hibernal solstice, and bodies are clapping and dancing, circling around a bonfire. Sparks erupt, the mood is euphoric. The dancers wear twigs in their hair, masks made out of lichen. A figure wearing a donkey mask bucks and weaves, giving thanks for the change of seasons, the movement of the Pleiades across the sky. The end of the harvest, labour making space for rest, for surrender.
The Rites of When is split into two movements. It riffs on Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which evokes pagan sacrifice in ancient Russia, but the “when” of its title is speculative. The dancers wear jeans, puffer jackets – signifiers of our late capitalist moment. They inhabit a time that may exist both before and after them, conceived not in increments but by a resonance between bodies: both the celestial and the human.
4. Mesiti has always done this: traced out patterns and resonances that tie the future and the past that, in retrospect, feel at once miraculous and obvious. Think of the teenagers in the mosh pit in her 2009 video Rapture (Silent Anthem), limbs entangled, faces lit from within as if in worship. Or the musicians in Citizens Band (2012), new migrants who play out old melodies in a train, in a taxi, on the surface of a swimming pool. Or the Lebanese drummers in her installation for the 2019 Venice Biennale, Assembly. Her best work is like being let in on a secret.
The blue light from the Pleiades first left the stars 440 light years ago. The Rites of When represents Mesiti’s move away from observation towards invention. But each time we look at the stars, we experience a cosmic loop. We encounter “then” and “now” as interchangeable.
On the floor of the installation, a circle and a crescent symbolise the Nebra sky disc, an ancient map that once linked the cartography of the sky to harvests and was discovered in 1999 by archaeologists. The Rites of When’s seven screens are vertical, resembling the shape of our smartphones, our compasses to the modern world.
When crises mount, I still open my SkyView app and scan the stars, calmed only when the constellations come into focus.
5. After the hibernal solstice comes the aestival. An industrial tractor razes a bleached-yellow wheatfield, leaving stripes in the earth that are both terrifying and hypnotic. Fires ripple across the screen, plumes of ash and ember. In front of me, schoolkids watch the work, transfixed, arms around each other. At the end, they lie down.
In The Rites of When, landscapes are abstracted. They appear without people. Crisis is rendered so poetically, it acquires the mythos of astronomical phenomena. What Dillard said: “Seeing this black body was like seeing a mushroom cloud.” But when terror and awe are conflated, I wonder, how are we spurred into action? At what point does surrender to ritual also absolve us of responsibility, the cyclical nature of time a smokescreen for the violence of the here and now?
In The Rites of When, the dancers who circle the bonfire during the hibernal solstice span cultures and nationalities, yet their geography is placeless, nameless. They exist out of language, history. They are avatars for what we could be. The universal stories of the Pleiades, named for seven sisters in Greek mythology, morph and shift across borders. To submit to the idea that time, cosmic or otherwise, unfolds evenly is to deny a hierarchy of disaster – and the different prices it can enact.
6. The second time I visit The Rites of When, disaster has struck again. The “now” feels unbearable. In the subterranean darkness of the Tank, any cynicism dissipates. The swirl of the Milky Way, the golden orb of the sun, float from one screen to another, engulfing the senses.
In a Mesiti work, sight often deceives you. Often, the artist illuminates the primal, the invisible, threads of connection that are outside form, outside language, that are felt rather than perceived.
I watch the dancers move around the bonfire, carrying out a traditional “circle dance” during the hibernal solstice. The repetition of gestures is strangely reassuring. During the aestival movement, the dancers stamp their feet and click their fingers, their bodies percussive instruments, sending secret messages to each other, communicating what can’t be said. In the last sequence, “Ecstatic Collectivity”, bodies writhe together, dancing in rapture, their faces glowing under moonlight. To witness their joy feels thrilling.
7. There are worlds alongside this one, if you decide to pay attention, if you know where to look.
Angelica Mesiti: The Rites of When is showing at the Tank, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, until May 11.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 23, 2024 as "All the Pleiades".
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