La Biennale di Venezia provides Australian artists with critical international coverage, exposing them to key new audiences, markets and contexts. The Biennale Arte 2019 sees artistic team, Angelica Mesiti with Juliana Engberg as curator representing Australia at our pavilion in the Giardini.

Angelica Mesiti uses film to examine ways citizens can assemble and communicate against the backdrop of fragile democracy.  ASSEMBLY was 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.

Angelica Mesiti created an important new work for the 2019 Venice Biennale that depicts the many faces of modern Australia, the fragility of the human condition, and our need in difficult times, to come together to share, celebrate and gain strength. Described by the Washington Post as “complicated and fascinating… Angelica Mesiti dramatizes the dissolution of old orders, power structures and aesthetic ideologies, dissolved into the liquid of rhythm and dance and a momentarily (and perhaps imaginary) utopia of communion’, ASSEMBLY resonated for international and Australian audiences alike.