31 Oct 2014

Angelica Mesiti: Citizens Band at the Williams College Museum of Art

In its US debut Angelica Mesiti's Citizens Band opens at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) and will be on view through January 4, 2015. Angelica Mesiti is a video, performance and installation artist living and working in Sydney and Paris. Mesiti's projects have focused on music, dance performance, the ballad, and oral storytelling traditions.

Citizens Band (2012) unites four individuals from Cameroon, Algeria, Mongolia, and Sudan in a cinematic and immersive multi-channel video installation. The performers, situated in Paris, Sydney or Brisbane—the large cosmopolitan cities that have become their adopted homes—carry on the traditions of their birthplaces through personal and intimate forms of music. The protagonists are encountered individually, each screen playing in succession. Each musical interlude, its own deeply private moment, occurs in a very public location—a community pool, a crowded subway, a taxicab, or a street corner. Generated with little more than their bodies alone, the sound emerges from deep within each player and penetrates and fills the gallery. The video culminates in a powerful fifth piece of music, along with abstract visuals, that weaves together the four distinct expressions with the cacophonous background of the bustling cities.

'We're excited to bring this important work by Angelica Mesiti to the US and the college community,' said Lisa Dorin, WCMA Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs. 'Her particular non-verbal, very bodily form of storytelling resonates on a deeply human level. With an amazing economy of means her video fuses transnational migration, ritual, music and performance traditions, naturally connecting to a range of disciplines across campus.'

About the Artist
Angelica Mesiti's solo exhibitions include Rapture (silent anthem) Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane and The Line of Lode and Death of Charlie Day, 24HR Art Northern Territory Centre for Contemporary Art, Darwin (2012). Her work has been shown widely in international venues including: Sharjah Biennale 11, United Arab Emirates. (2013); Kochi Muziris Biennial, Kochi, India (2012); Seventeenth International Art Festival Videobrasil, Sao Paolo, Brasil; London Australia Film Festival, The Barbican, London, UK; South by Southeast, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, Japan (2011). She was a founding member of the Sydney artist run gallery Imperial Slacks and curated the video publication Serial 7's. Mesiti was also a member of the collaborative group The Kingpins, who performed in international venues including: The Musée d'Art Modern de la Ville de Paris (2007); Liverpool Biennial, UK; and The Palais de Tokyo (2006).