ADVANCE ARTS AWARD WINNER 2019
Angelica lives and works between Paris and Sydney. Mesiti is a contemporary artist working in the field of moving image installation and performance. She is currently Australia’s representative at the 58th Venice Biennale with her multi-screen video installation titled ASSEMBLY.
Angelica 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. While borrowing archetypes and stylistic cues from cinema, and using the visual language of film to present detailed studies of human subjects in heightened states of reverie or reflection, Mesiti’s works eschew linearity. Instead, she uses a rich, aesthetic treatment to uncover the transformative potential of all human beings, valuing the qualities of ambiguity and indeterminacy in their own right.
Mesiti’s work is regularly shown in museums and biennales internationally and has previously held solo exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo Paris, MAXXI Rome, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, O Space, Aarhus, Williams College Museum of Art Massachusetts, and Nikolaj Kunsthal Copenhagen. She has received numerous awards, grants and commissions including Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media Arts (2013), Australian Film Televisions and Radio School Creative Fellowship (2011), Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney C3West commission (2011), winner of the 58th Blake Prize for spiritual and religious art (2009).
Her work is held in national and international collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, FRAC Franche-Compté France, Museum of Contemporary Art Seoul and Kadist Art Foundation Paris/San Francisco.
Angelica Mesiti is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery Australia and Gallerie Allen Paris.
Winner of the Advance Arts Award 2019
> Celebrating the work of winner Angelica Mesiti | Watch
