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Rapture (silent anthem) captures a teenage crowd caught in a slow-motion expression of quasi-religious fervour at a rock concert. Both a celebration of life and a look at the darker aspects of this zeal, the video takes a contemporary look at the human need for transcendence and communal ritual in unlikely places.

Angelica Mesiti was born in Sydney and studied at the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW. She works within the traditions of video, performance and installation and generates material through a range of approaches including staged situations, site specific performative acts, re-enactment and documentation. Her videos operate within a cinematic framework to offer fractured narratives that negotiate between primary experience and historical retelling. She uses performance as a way to embrace the present moment and several of her works focus on the dynamics of group activity as a form of social exchange.

"There`s an old man He tells a story In the best way That he knows Of a hill In the desert Where he can No longer go" Set in the Australian outback town of Broken Hill, The Line of Lode and Death of Charlie Day is a story about stories. Reflecting on how different knowledges of one place intersect and overlap, the artist uses video to play with the conventions of cinematic and folkloric storytelling. Three intersecting histories of the region form the backbone of the work: Indigenous understanding of the land, the development of mining in the area including its link to the foundation of Broken Hill, and the story of a local attraction, Mario`s Palace Hotel. These images note how stories are carried by people through generations, and that they are not so much histories set in the past, as an enduring set of relationships between land and people.

Angelica Mesiti 1976, Sydney Australia. Lives and works in Paris and Sydney. Angelica Mesiti is a video, performance and installation artist based in Sydney. Her works often explore the notions of alternative histories sought through layered and less voiced stories embedded within landscapes and urban environments. Her works attempts to discover the unseen possibilities of sites through displaced activities like performance, costume and music. Exhibiting regularly since 2000, Mesiti has had solo and group shows across Australia and overseas including; LOOP Video festival Barcelona 2008, O.K Video Festival (2005), National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta, Game On (2006) for the Next Wave festival, Gertrude St Contemporary Art Space Melbourne and the touring show PLAY: Portraiture and Performance in Recent Video Art from Australia and New Zealand, (2006) shown at The Performance Space Sydney, Adam Art Gallery New Zealand and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. She was a founding member of the Sydney artists run Gallery Imperial Slacks during which time she curated the video publication Serial 7?s. She has been employed by the College of Fine Arts as a casual lecturer in the Time Based Art department since 2001. Since 2000 Mesiti has been a member of the collaborative group The Kingpins, who have exhibited and performed in museums nationally and overseas including the Kunstmuseum Zurich 2008, Musée d?Art Modern Paris 2007, The Palaise de Tokyo and Nuit Blanch-Paris 2006, Liverpool Biennial 2006-UK, Contemporary Art Centre- Vilnius, Lithuania and Zacheta National Gallery of Art- Warsaw 2006, Transmodern Age Festival, Maryland, Baltimore USA 2006, South Korea, 2004 Taipei Biennale,Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Super Delux Tokyo 2004.

Future Perfect Continuous is an invitation to meditate, to listen closely, and to consider the greater meaning of small gestures. In this work, Angelica Mesiti creates a crease in time and in memory, while offering an anchor to a transcendent idea of community. Future Perfect Continuous is based on a game usually taught to children in a classroom setting as a community building or drama-warm-up exercise. It involves a simple series hands gesture like rubbing, snapping, clapping, slapping that when repeated by the group generate a sound performance that convincingly mimics the sound of a rainstorm. For this video the ‘rain-storm’ activity is performed by a diverse group of young adults in their 20s, at the start of their adult life. 'We can imagine them leaving home and entering society, forming new communities'(1). ‘In my work I often explore the idea of the individual and the collective and how gesture and sound can be used to express a cultural experience or moment. I am interested in how this innocent game of imitating nature could also represent a turbulence that is part of the present. The performers become the weather’(2). 1 Kathleen Ritter 2 Angelica Mesiti

Angelica Mesiti is a multi-disciplinary artist based between Paris & Sydney. Her practice combines performance with video, sound and spatial installation to create immersive environments of absorption and contemplation. 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 videos that reveal how culture is manifested through non-linguistic forms of communication, and especially through vocabularies of sound and gesture.There is a focus in her work on the unquantifiable social role played by music — and, by extension, sound in general — in our relationship with the world. Mesiti’s work is regularly shown in museums and biennales internationally. Her work ASSEMBLY was the official Australian presentation at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019).