Angel­i­ca Mesiti

9 Sep­tem­ber 2017 — March 2018 Con­tem­po­rary art gal­leries | Low­er Ground Free entry

Angel­i­ca Mesi­ti has long been fas­ci­nat­ed by per­for­mance: as a mode of sto­ry­telling and a means to express social ideas in phys­i­cal form. In recent years she has been mak­ing refined videos that reveal how cul­ture is man­i­fest­ed through non-lin­guis­tic forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and espe­cial­ly through vocab­u­lar­ies of sound and ges­ture. While bor­row­ing arche­types and styl­is­tic cues from cin­e­ma, and using the visu­al lan­guage of film to present detailed stud­ies of human sub­jects in height­ened states of rever­ie or reflec­tion, Mesiti’s works eschew lin­ear­i­ty. Instead, she uses a rich, aes­thet­ic treat­ment to uncov­er the trans­for­ma­tive poten­tial of all human beings, valu­ing the qual­i­ties of ambi­gu­i­ty and inde­ter­mi­na­cy in their own right. This exhi­bi­tion fea­tures five recent works, offer­ing an expan­sive view of the range of sub­jects with which Mesi­ti has engaged. When con­sid­ered togeth­er, this suite reveals how the artist bears wit­ness to enchant­ed moments of inner life with her cam­era. Inten­si­ty builds through an accu­mu­la­tion of rhythms, sounds and ges­tures, flow­ing back and forth between indi­vid­ual and social space – from per­son to per­son, sit­u­a­tion to sit­u­a­tion, cul­ture to cul­ture. The Gallery has pro­posed an acqui­si­tion of The call­ing 2013 – 14, which reflects Mesiti’s ongo­ing inter­est in non-ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion and adapt­ed forms of expres­sion. To make the work she trav­elled to three regions in Turkey, Greece and The Canary Islands, where, for cen­turies, whis­tled lan­guages have been used to car­ry mes­sages, gos­sip, argue and court, all over great dis­tance. Only a hand­ful have sur­vived the arrival of tele­phones, and the artist met with vil­lage com­mu­ni­ties and schools to study the ways in which these musi­cal tech­niques have been altered and adapt­ed over time; espe­cial­ly in the face of recent, dra­mat­ic change. Tak­ing the appear­ance of a doc­u­men­tary, this project is also an extend­ed explo­ration of how, Mesi­ti says, ​‘a cul­tur­al activ­i­ty that is no longer a nec­es­sary part of dai­ly life can be held onto as a cul­tur­al arte­fact, and how that activ­i­ty then enters into anoth­er state. It becomes a tra­di­tion that can be per­formed as a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a culture’s iden­ti­ty, shift­ing from some­thing use­ful to some­thing sym­bol­ic’. The reli­gious and sec­u­lar are inter­wo­ven in Rap­ture (silent anthem) 2009, where Mesi­ti uses silence and slow motion to pow­er­ful effect, film­ing fresh-faced teenagers in the mosh pit at a rock con­cert. Shot from a con­cealed loca­tion, we see youths lost in wor­ship and the tight­ly cropped footage sug­gests a scene of col­lec­tive fer­vour and spir­i­tu­al trans­porta­tion. Pre­sent­ed near­by in the exhi­bi­tion space is anoth­er silent work pre­sent­ed in slow motion, the exul­tant Nakh removed 2015, which exam­ines and reimag­ines a Berber rit­u­al – the rite of the nakh, or hair dance – where the repeat­ed rock­ing of the head and body are reput­ed to ele­vate the dancer into a trance state. These hyp­not­ic rhythms would tra­di­tion­al­ly be con­duct­ed by young women dur­ing the wed­ding fes­ti­val sea­son that fol­lows the first har­vest, but here, they take place in the con­tem­po­rary space of the stu­dio. Else­where, Cit­i­zens band 2012 traces unique musi­cal and aur­al lan­guages across time and space. Played in suc­ces­sion as four affect­ing chap­ters, each intro­duces us to an indi­vid­ual per­form­ing a musi­cal tra­di­tion from their home­land, adapt­ed for a new envi­ron­ment. Loïs Geral­dine Zon­go, a Cameroon­ian woman, pounds the chlo­ri­nat­ed waters of a Parisian swim­ming pool, her com­plex per­cus­sive beats picked out using a tech­nique called aku­tuk, or water drumming.