Underground, in the decommissioned fuel bunker of the Tank gallery, a polyphonic and percussive chant rises over scenes from an urban car park. There’s a crackling bonfire, a burning donkey effigy and popping fireworks.

The Paris-based Australian video artist Angelica Mesiti has reimagined a winter solstice celebration for the 21st century in the first act of a monumental video and sound installation commissioned by the Art Gallery of NSW.

“My proposition is we are living in urban spaces, very distanced from shifts in the seasons and the fiction in the work is about a time and place where we reimagine traditions that help us connect back to nature,” Mesiti says.

Since opening in December 2022, the Tank gallery has hosted the fantastical alien-like sculptures of Argentinian Adrian Villar Rojas and the spinning spiders and strung anatomical forms of Louise Bourgeois.

Mesiti is the first Australian artist commissioned to present for the gallery’s answer to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London.

“When I first encountered the Tank, I was really taken by the scale, but more importantly, the acoustic nature of the space,” Mesiti says. “I was really interested in the way that the reverberation and echo was such an inherent quality of the architecture.

“It reminded me of other environments like a cave, or a cathedral, or other sort of cavernous spaces that have this kind of natural resonant acoustics, and that was really a starting point for my thinking about a project in the Tank.”

For The Rites of When, Mesiti has arrayed seven monolithic video screens in a formation that references the Pleiades star cluster, famously known as the Seven Sisters in the Southern Hemisphere. On first encounter, it feels like Stonehenge meets 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The 34-minute film begins in the swirling cosmos and switches to aerial panoramas of snowy plantation forests, then to processional fireworks in the Paris car park.

The second movement touches on the Aestival or the summer solstice and has a much more contemporary feel. We see industrial-scale harvesting of tinder-dry wheat fields that accidentally catch alight and sequences of saturated colours foreground with silhouetted figures.

“It’s like being in a Mark Rothko painting, it’s so beautiful,” curator Beatrice Gralton says. “It references the heat and changing colour of the day. The original score that accompanies the whole work is a combination of polyphonic singing and chanting in the first sequence while the second is percussion, featuring clicking, clapping, and body slapping, culminating in electronic music like a dance party.

“It gives this sense of ecstatic collectivity, the feeling you have at music concert or a nightclub. That sense of being with a mass of people in celebration.”

Mesiti has long used different forms of communication, ranging from sign language, choreographic gesture, Morse code and whistling to ancestral musical traditions.

For her first solo presentation with the gallery, Mesiti has worked with various musicians and choreographers based in Europe including an all-women’s choral group, La Mossa, a choreographer who specialises in traditional cultural dance across the Mediterranean and the Parisian DJ, Chloe Thevenin.

Mesiti is no singer, but has always loved music: “I think my connection to it comes through my training as a dancer. I think that my kind of body response and reaction to music probably comes from that sort of early training.”

What next? Not sure. I have to recover from this one first.

In fact, dance and art vied for the attention of the young Mesiti. The granddaughter of first-generation Italian migrants trained for 10 years in classical ballet and contemporary dance, winning a scholarship to London’s Laban Dance Centre when she was 18.

Drifting from dance, Mesiti enrolled in the College of Fine Arts at the University of NSW and began dabbling in sound making, film and video, working as an editor’s assistant on an early short film with Warwick Thornton.

“Out of that amazing experience I was very curious to try and direct more,” she says. “Until that point, I was more engaged in performance and art making. Thank you, Warwick.”

Despite such inspiration, Mesiti has always regarded herself as a visual artist more than a filmmaker. “I really think I’m a collagist more than a storyteller, and that’s the reason why I work in contemporary art.

“I’m allowed to go in the direction of suggestion and abstraction rather than tie loose ends into a narrative.

“For me, it feels more natural to construct works that accumulate in meaning rather than have a sequential story. That’s why the single screen is not really my way of working. I like working across multiple screens, so there is a plurality of ideas happening at once.”

Video art installations have been evolving as quickly as the technology that presents them. Gralton says the production values Mesiti has instilled in this work are nothing less than extraordinary. It took two years to develop and two years to produce.

“There’s nothing about this video that is point and shoot,” Gralton says. “Mesiti is about asking questions for which there are no answers. She builds a collage from her knowledge of music, dance and archaeology and art history and presents us with a new speculative concept of what might be possible. That’s why art is still important.”

Mesiti has lived in Paris for more than 10 years and except for Sydney’s celestial sky, the film was shot in France.

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“I feel like, for me, anyway, Paris is a very nourishing place to live, artistically and creatively,” Mesiti says. “It is a shift of perspective, to be an outsider in a place that is not your own, that you haven’t grown up in and that you’re constantly learning about. I think that that’s a kind of productive space for me to create work.”

The Tank commission is a high point in her artistic life after representing Australia at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.

“It’s really quite a gift for an artist and yeah, I’ve absolutely enjoyed every minute of it. What next? Not sure. I have to recover from this one first.”

The Rites of When runs from September 21 to May 11, 2025 at the Art Gallery of NSW.