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07.2025
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05.2025
Cashin the Crash
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Projects
Essays & Reviews
SelectedWork
About
©2025 jessicatok.com
In an era of uncertainty, overconsumption and disconnection with the world around us,
escape is where we seek comfort. Perhaps what we need is not avoidance, but deeper connection and a willingness to sit with the unease of our time. In doing so, we open ourselves to the meaning-making process, encouraging one which fosters reflection, questioning and a deeper engagement with the world, and how we might live better in it. This seeking is what drew me to The Rites of When. It is a work that quietly confronts, not consoles, offering presence through an embodied experience. What struck me the most was not only the effect of the work itself but its interaction with space. The Tank, a structure of containment within the institutional AGNSW, is the living body of Mesiti's work. Interestingly, this exchange unsettles the conventions of museological display. Spaces traditionally static and distanced become arenas of embodiment. Here, the museum is no longer a container for art; it exists in dialogue with it, co-producing meaning and responding to the needs of our cultural moment.
The Rites of When unfolds through rhythm and ritual, where sound and movement are
primary ways of knowing. Deep, layered, and almost Gregorian, rhythm is not a metaphor but a sensation, and I am cycled between the past, present and future. Closing my eyes inside the Tank I feel what is being spoken, rather than simply knowing it. We experience the world through the body, and my body became a site for the work. One sequence stays with me: the hibernal ritual. Townspeople encircle the flames of a bonfire following a procession of grounded movement. The seven screens wrap the audience, reflecting the ritual space. Bodily percussion - hand slaps, vocal chants and pounding feet erupt sound as a rhythmic pulse. The space feels ancestral to me. I later discovered Mesiti drew from Southern Italian winter carnivals and religious processions - a tradition both she and I share. As a fellow Calabrian-Australian, the rhythm spoke to my body before my mind could grasp its weight. Affect is shaped by art and space, and arrives before thought. The pre-conscious response is very real, creating meaning before we can understand it.
Where art museums traditionally prioritise clarity and spectatorship, The Rites of When encourages an experience far more visceral. This invitation for experience does not occur through the artwork alone but is made possible through the Tank. Subterranean and vast, it is a space that resists a singular focus. Seven screens encircled the room, and I was unsure where to place myself. The concrete pillars fragment with the sightlines, making it impossible to view all screens at once. There is seating in the centre that grounds a moment of stillness yet the work continues to move around you, slightly out of reach. Vaulted ceilings and concrete walls create a chamber of resonance where deep frequencies are stretched and distorted.
This disorientation is not a barrier but becomes part of the work's rhythm. Mesiti understands this, and instead of controlling the architecture, she works with it. The absence of a fixed perspective invites drift, a surrendering to the work. Fragmentation becomes form,
referencing not only the architecture of the Tank but the fractured nature through which we
receive the world. The vertical screen, for example, mirrors the shape of a smartphone. You are not positioned in front of the work, you become inside of it. The Rites of When and the Tank move together, forming a continuous cycle that removes the barrier between the audience and art. This is amplified by Mesiti’s design of the seven screens to work proportionately with the Tank, each representing a star that together form the Pleiades cluster. The square-mirrored floor motifs reference the Nebra Sky Disc, a Bronze Age sky calendar. These spatial designs are not decorative. They are themes within Mesiti’s work and demonstrate how architecture and artwork can co-produce meaning. The Tank no longer houses the experience, rather it is part of its unfolding, offering a space of resonance and connection in an disconnected world.
Rather than engaging traditional modes of passive spectatorship, Mesiti offers a different kind of engagement, one which requests a presence beyond the physical, an openness of body to felt experience. This mode of engagement resonates with the current moment, a point in timeshaped by post-pandemic fatigue, collective grief and a growing need for intimacy and connection. While the pandemic was catalytic in how museums rethought engagement, these shifts are increasingly impacted by the growing global crises. From environmental crises, political unrest, technological acceleration and the lingering effects of the pandemic, humanity remains unsettled. Fragility, uncertainty and a fracturing of time leave us in ongoing limbo, marking an overall sense of disconnection from place and community. In this context, traditional museological formats, such as the white cube, fail to serve the needs of society. Audiences need experiences that move them, emotionally and intellectually.
The Rites of When is both a conceptual and experimental response to this shift. As previously mentioned, the Tank chamber invites an embodied mode of engagement. Amongst the seven screens, my body felt part of the composition, not outside it. This reflects a key quality of installation art, where the visitor becomes an embodied presence in the work. In this way, Mesiti challenges the museum's authority as the sole producer of meaning, encouraging interpretive agency by the viewer. This redistribution is also deeply spatial, as interpretation is inseparable from the space the work unfolds in. Unlike the conventional white cube, famously critiqued in Brian O’Doherty’s exposé an isolated, ideological space, The Tank doesn't try to hide what it is. It is a raw, industrial, historically-charged space that rejects the placeless fantasy. Within this context, the museum is no longer sealed from the world, but in dialogue with it, offering viewers a chance to feel, connect and learn from the world it reflects.
However, such modes of engagement are not without their challenges. The qualities that make the work powerful, its immersion and conceptual openness, also make it demanding. In a culture defined by consumption and distraction, Mesiti’s work requires a willingness of being. During the 34-minute viewing of The Rites of When, I noticed that few visitors remained the entire duration. A reminder of the difficulty of stillness in our viewing culture. This isn’t a judgement, but a reminder of what this type of work asks from its viewer. As a student of contemporary art, I recognise my background shapes the way I receive and value this open-ended engagement. I am conscious other viewers may not, or cannot
share this position. This raises an important question: who might this work unintentionally
exclude? Foremost, accessibility is an issue. The blackened space and shifting sightlines is
distorting, excluding visitors with visual and sensory impairment. Furthermore, the idea of
viewer agency is complicated. While some viewers may sink into the sensory abundance, othersmay struggle to anchor themselves. For viewers who prefer structured narratives and interpretive scaffolds, the openness can be alienating. Even so, an embodied experience doesn’t allow for full interpretive freedom. It is a different kind of framing, one which operates through affect rather than instruction. As Carol Duncan reminds us, museums cannot be entirely passive containers of culture. Whether it be through architecture, cultural framing or institutional ideology, meaning-making is always mediated.
Yet it's these tensions that underscore the relevance of Mesiti’s work within the institution. In a cultural landscape defined by distraction, speed and consumption, The Rites of When offers something else, the chance to experience presence and reflection. While this work is
challenging, that is where the value lies. The Rites of When exists not to accommodate audience expectations, but to disrupt them, challenging our role as the passive spectator and encouraging different forms of engagement. Although it doesn’t completely dismantle meaning-making authority, Mesiti’s work reconfigures it by shifting from didacticism to embodied encounters, which is by nature far more subjective. This is a positive progression towards a different kind of museum practice, one where the site becomes a space of encounter, allowing audiences to feel, grow and reflect through a greater sense of open-ended meaning.
The Rites of When and the Tank do not exist in isolation, they are framed and presented within the broader institutional realities of AGNSW. As a major public institution, the AGNSW has large aspirations to be a 21st-century museum dedicated to equity, access and public connection. The tension between ambition and the realities of institutional framing is central to the Tank’s role within the AGNSW. A curatorial opportunity and spatial outlier, The Tank offers a rare platform to engage with space and create open experiences. But it also presents a curatorial risk. Physically marginal and logistically complex, the Tank is located within the depths of the Naala Badu building and is easily overlooked by casual visitors. A symbolically powerful site, yet spatially peripheral and missable.
This questions whether the gallery’s structural expansion is delivering on its broader goals of accessibility and engagement. This carries weight in the context of AGNSW’s broader financial concerns. Despite doubling its footprint, without the $65 million taxpayer funding last year, the institution would have incurred a $30 million loss. While the $344 million Sydney Modern expansion is celebrated as a progressive leap forward, others questioned whether it was substantive change or merely aesthetic - a “Hollywood set” masking institutional inertia. It is a delicate balancing act that newly appointed director Maud Page must lead. Tasked with the responsibility of expanding the AGNSW’s reach without compromising curatorial integrity. From the demands of state funding and private donors to public scrutiny and criticism, it is a difficult field of expectations to navigate. Leadership has faced criticism for being too radical at the hands of political idealism. This presents the broader question at the centre of AGNSW’s evolution: do these changes represent authentic institutional transformation or illusions of progress?
In this greater context, The Rites of When is not only an artwork but a provocation. It tests the limits of possibility when an institution like the AGNSW attempts to create space for progressive work. Whether the AGNSW can continue to support art like Mesiti’s as part of its ongoing curatorial goals remains uncertain. But her work is the first to fully reveal what is possible when vision and space align. In this way, it offers a glimpse into how museums of the future can reconfigure their institutional structures to become co-creators, rather than gatekeepers of cultural experience.
Jessica Tok