The Tank, a cavernous gallery in a former oil reservoir below the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), is the setting for a monumental new work by the Sydney-born artist Angelica Mesiti that seeks to realign our connection to the cosmos.
In the two years since it opened, the Tank has been the backdrop to speculative ruins from an imagined future in Adrián Villar Rojas’s The End of Imagination, stood in for Louise Bourgeois’s subconscious in the late artist’s retrospective Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day? and hosted the headliners André 3000 and Solange as part of the gallery’s Volume music festival.
Now the Tank will form the backdrop to Mesiti’s The Rites of When, an immersive multi-screen installation that is the Paris-based artist’s first major solo exhibition in Australia.
While in appearance the Tank is just about as far from a conventional gallery space as you can get, the idea that a white box is neutral “is nonsense”, says AGNSW curator Justin Paton. With its entrance a modest stairwell on the bottom floor of the museum, the Tank is like “a secret in the basement”, Paton says, citing visitors to the Bourgeois retrospective who emerged “fully satisfied” from the well-lit gallery spaces above only to discover the exhibition continued in the Tank. “In a way, the qualities of surprise and discovery are mediums that the artist gets to work with,” he says.
Angelica Mesiti, The Rites of When (2024) © Angelica Mesiti, photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Jenni Carter
Although the global pandemic has mostly disappeared from daily news cycles, its impact overshadowed the first two Tank commissions. Australia’s closed borders forced Villar Rojas, who usually works site-specifically, to develop sculptures in the virtual realm, construct them at his studio in Argentina and then ship them to Sydney ahead of the opening in 2022.
For Mesiti, who moved from Paris to the French countryside as Europe’s first lockdown loomed, a pandemic inspired “tree-change” at the start of spring brought into sharp focus the widening gap between humans and the environment—a central theme of The Rites of When. “The natural world was bursting with life, while the human species was experiencing a kind of dormancy, death and illness,” Mesiti tells The Art Newspaper.
Immersed in a tight-knit agricultural community, where local farmers shared pruning advice and the night sky was filled with stars, “the thread of the work seems to come together”, says Beatrice Gralton, AGNSW’s senior curator of contemporary Australian art.
According to Gralton, Mesiti has a gift for “noticing the beauty and poetry” in ordinary acts, and in The Rites of When she is presenting “new rituals, new ways of doing things that coincide with the seasonal harvests”.
Although The Rites of When unfolds across multiple screens, as did Assembly, Mesiti’s offering at the 2019 Venice Biennale, the Tank commission “called for me to work differently”, Mesiti says. And not just in response to the parameters of the space, which has “no unobstructed sight lines” and is “longer than being inside a cathedral or deep cave”, she says.
Instead of Mesiti’s trademark observational approach, for the Tank commission she collaborated with the choreographer Filipe Lourenço to create sequences with performers that reflect our “close connection to the natural world”, she says. Composed of two distinct movements representing the winter and summer solstices, The Rites of When builds in intensity as performers mark dawn, dusk and the passing of the seasons and celebrate the longest and shortest days of the year. But while the work might be inspired by age-old rituals, Mesiti says she is also questioning if that human connection to the natural environment is still present, and “if not, could it be?”.
Gralton says Mesiti’s desire to “embrace the risk” of working with the Tank has been “hugely exciting”. “She’s the only person who can imagine how this thing is going to behave over seven screens in this enormous space,” Gralton adds.
• Angelica Mesiti: The Rites of When, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 21 September-11 May 2025
