Angelica Mesiti's 'Reverb' Exhibition at Museum Tinguely Explores Time and Communication

Museum Tinguely in Basel presents 'Reverb,' the first comprehensive Swiss solo exhibition of Paris-based Australian artist Angelica Mesiti (b. 1976), running until 30 August. The show features five video works that investigate nonverbal communication through performance, sound, and movement. Central to the exhibition is the seven-channel installation 'The Rites of When' (2024), which draws inspiration from the 3,600-year-old Nebra sky disc and the Pleiades constellation to imagine new rituals for an ecologically uncertain future. Another recent work, 'Sidereal' (2024), features suspended dancers against a color-shifting background, evoking celestial movement. 'A Hundred Years' (2020) reflects on the World War I battlefields of the Somme in France, where musician Julien Desailly performs within the Lochnagar Crater. 'Relay League' (2017) references the final Morse code message sent by the French Navy in 1997. 'Prepared Piano for Movers (Haussmann)' (2012) documents two people carrying a piano up six flights of stairs in Paris, highlighting human labor. Mesiti, who represented Australia at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, describes her approach as creating 'quasi-science fiction, utopian, speculative adventure' about our 'out-of-sync world.' The exhibition is commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and co-produced by the Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain and the Fonds d'art contemporain de la Ville de Genève.