Artist Angelica Mesiti presents her solo exhibition "Reverb" at Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland, featuring the seven-channel film installation *The Rites of When* (2024) as its centerpiece. The film, inspired by Stravinsky's *Rite of Spring* and the Aboriginal concept of non-linear time, documents a participatory midnight performance Mesiti staged in a former cosmetics factory in Aubervilliers, France, where participants wore plant-based headpieces and staffs, joined by singers whose chants guided a slow procession culminating in a bonfire and fireworks. The exhibition also includes four other multichannel works from 2012 onward, exploring alternative forms of communication such as tree fungi networks, flower calls to bees, whistling languages, and signed speech.
This exhibition matters because Mesiti, who represented Australia at the 2019 Venice Biennale, uses her practice to address the current climate crisis by proposing ways humans can "re-tune" themselves to natural and non-verbal modes of connection. By blending ritual, science fiction, and Indigenous temporal concepts, she offers a hopeful, speculative vision for re-aligning with the environment and each other. The show's placement alongside Jean Tinguely's kinetic sculptures at the museum underscores a dialogue between mechanical and organic rhythms, making it a timely contribution to contemporary art's engagement with ecological and spiritual reorientation.