Angelica Mesiti’s Basel exhibition turns ritual into a language of its own
A midnight performance in a derelict courtyard north of Paris has become the emotional center of Angelica Mesiti’s newest film installation. In “Reverb,” now on view at Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland, through August 30, the Sydney-born, Paris-based artist presents The Rites of When, a seven-channel work completed in 2024 that transforms a winter gathering into a meditation on time, climate, and collective feeling.
The film began in Aubervilliers, where Mesiti invited about 35 people of different ages and backgrounds to take part in a filmed performance. Participants were given headpieces and staffs made from dried plants and flowers, then led through a slow procession that gathered around a bonfire before ending with fireworks erupting from a papier-mâché donkey. Singing, movement, and a kind of wordless coordination shaped the scene, which Mesiti framed as a carnivalesque ritual marking the end of winter.
The title The Rites of When points in two directions at once: to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and to “everywhen,” the Aboriginal concept of non-linear time. Mesiti has described the work as a “quasi-science fiction, utopian, speculative adventure about our out-of-sync world,” and the finished installation extends that idea through a seven-channel configuration linked to the seven most visible stars in the Pleiades. The room itself was designed in relation to the 3,600-year-old Nebra sky disc, an object thought to have functioned as an agricultural calendar.
Seen in that setting, the film’s winter procession takes on a wider resonance. It is not simply a record of performance, but a reflection on how communities mark seasonal change, how ritual survives in secular form, and how art can register the unease of climate extremes and biodiversity loss without resorting to literal illustration.
The Rites of When is the centerpiece of “Reverb,” which also includes four other multichannel works made since 2012. Across the exhibition, Mesiti returns to nonverbal communication as a central artistic problem. She has explored the humming of trees and fungi, the invisible calls flowers make to bees, whistling languages, signed speech, and choreographed gesture. In works such as The Colour of Saying (2015) and Relay League (2017), she treats song, sign, and movement as forms of translation — fragile, embodied, and deeply human.
Mesiti, who represented Australia at the 2019 Venice Biennale, has built a practice around the question of how people speak across distance when words are not enough. In Basel, that question unfolds with unusual clarity, set between mechanical sculpture, celestial reference, and the lingering memory of a winter night in Aubervilliers.
