Assembly

Creative Work
Year: 
2019
Record Status: 
Tags: 
Description (in English): 

Angelica Mesiti’s ASSEMBLY is a new three-channel video installed within an architectural setting inspired by the historical shape of the community circle and amphitheatre. ASSEMBLY establishes as an evolving set of translations from the written word to stenographic codes then music, and performance. Filmed in the Senate chambers of Italy and Australia, the three screens of ASSEMBLY travel through the corridors, meeting rooms and parliaments of government while performers, representing the multitude of ancestries that constitute cosmopolitan Australia, gather, disassemble and re-unite, demonstrating the strength and creativity of a plural community.

Curator Juliana Engberg said, “ASSEMBLY uses and personifies the exilic energies of those who seek belonging in the community—the young, the female, Indigenous, the newly arrived and exiled, the refugee as well as the artist. Mesiti’s performers play along to an inherited code, but through translation, improvisation, adaptation, and re-interpretation demonstrate how a new music can emerge. The abstract relations and associations within ASSEMBLY open a space of imagined possibilities arising out of strange juxtapositions and unlikely re-locations.

“Cutting a rupture into the voided place of government to ignite a next succession of communication, ASSEMBLY seeks to create a new space for those who want to speak differently, hear attentively, and act together to form a new translation of the democratic process.”

Commissioned by the Australia Council for the Arts on the occasion of the 58th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Australia and Galerie Allen, Paris.

Curated for the Australian Pavilion by Juliana Engberg.

(Source: Artist's Website)

Technical notes: 

Assembly, 2019, 3-channel video installation in architectural amphitheatre High Definition video projections, colour, sound (6-channel mono)
 Duration: 25 minutes Variable dimensions

Research Collection that references this work:

Screen shots: 
A man playing a violin in a long corridor, with many doorways inset into wooden walls.
A white woman rising from a chair, a single finger raised in the air, before a case full of crowns.
Six drummers play drums, illuminated with blue lights, in a dimly lit room with a polished floor.
Two women sit in a large room with two raised ledges and red floor, watching "Assembly".
A wider shot of the above room, showing multiple screens and a small audience watching.
Multimedia: 

Australia - Angelica Mesiti - Assembly - Venice Art Biennale 2019

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Record posted by: 
Maud Ceuterick