“For millennia, humankind has gathered to celebrate or mark the shifts in seasonal cycles. Today, when the seasons are becoming disturbed and unsettled, how can we reconnect to the natural world in a way that’s meaningful for our uncertain times?” asks Angelica Mesiti. It’s a question the celebrated Australian contemporary artist’s new large-scale commission for the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW) aims to answer.

Currently installed in the museum’s underground Nelson Packer Tank, The Rites of When is an immersive work staged across seven enormous screens splayed among the tank’s thicket of columns. The 34-minute film incorporates vocal choruses, choreography and collective sound-making, reproducing the celebrations and festivals associated with the mid-winter solstice and mid-summer harvest. These traditions are then reimagined in a time when the rhythms of the seasons are disrupted by a changing climate.

More than four years in the making, The Rites of When was commissioned in January 2020, right before the Covid-19 pandemic put the world – and the project – on hold, and before the Tank had even opened to the public. “I had a lot of time to think about how I would approach the piece,” Mesiti says. “But the starting point for really thinking about the work was the space itself, the Tank, and the particularities of that space.”

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The cavernous Tank is housed in a former oil tank, which was built below the art gallery, into the side of the Domain, during World War II. Bunker-like and enormous, it’s a far cry from the white-box layout of traditional gallery spaces. Once borders reopened, the Paris-based Mesiti travelled to Sydney to “get a sense of a feeling for the scale of the space because it is so enormous”.

“I asked for access for a week so that I could do a kind of experimentation period, so I could get to understand the architecture of the space and particularly the acoustics. It had already been impressed upon me that [sound] has this very significant resonance in the space.”

Mesiti, who works collaboratively with a team of creatives and producers, invited musicians such as vocalist Sarah Blasko and percussionist Bree Van Ryke, as well as sound designer Bob Scott, to construct experiments and explore the potential of the unique gallery, with its columns and sprawl – it’s 2200 square metres, with seven-metre-high ceilings. This configuration meant the work couldn’t have just one particular point of view. Mesiti instead envisioned multiple screens installed around the space, while the gallery’s singular acoustics (“sound hangs around like a reverb in there”) were built into the audio component.

The tank’s “heavy history and atmosphere left an impression on the direction I went in”, says Mesiti. Visitors are submerged in depictions of Mesiti’s meditations on the environmental crisis, the Pleiades star cluster – used by traditional communities to track the seasonal cycles and harvests – as well as the environment itself. Choreography, sound and visuals (including soaring drone footage) deftly converge to immerse the viewer in the work.

Mesiti is best known in Australia for representing the country at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 with a multi-channel video installation that, among other things, showed performers from the multitudes of ancestries that make up the country’s population, to reflect a contemporary Australia. While her work is known for combining video, audio and performance, she calls The Rites of When a “total evolution and continuation of things I’ve been doing”. Her work has become less observational and more constructed, embracing choreography and direction.

Ultimately, Mesiti says her work for the Tank doesn’t aim to explain, rather to immerse – but if visitors feel “a motive in response to it”, that’s no bad thing.

“I try not to feel like I’m instructing the audience,” says Mesiti. “I’m trying to offer an experience that you can get lost in for a brief moment, for the 35 minutes that it’s going. I’m trying to create a full-body sound and visual experience that lets you drift away into the ideas.”

Angelica Mesiti: The Rites of When is open now and runts until May 11, 2025 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s Naala Badu (north building). Entry is free.

Broadsheet is a proud media partner of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.