20 June 2013

The Art Gallery of New South Wales announced today that artist Angelica Mesiti has won the $25,000 acquisitive Anne Landa Award for video and new media arts for her video work Citizens Band.

This year’s award was selected by Michael Brand, director of the Art Gallery of NSW, and Wayne Tunnicliffe, head of Australian art, in consultation with the exhibition curator Charlotte Day.

Michael Brand said: 'Angelica Mesiti’s Citizens Band is a highly resolved, moving and elegiac work in which the artist has filmed four people who all make music as part of their daily lives. While they no longer live in their home countries – Cameroon, Mongolia, Sudan and Algeria – all are evoked through their highly personal performances which are modest and yet resonant with cultural experiences acquired earlier in their lives’.

Charlotte Day comments: 'Angelica’s work Citizens Band conveys the power of performance as a form of expression and way of connecting people. The work is poignant without being sentimental, reflecting on the knowledge and experiences that we carry with us’.

The Anne Landa Award was the first acquisitive award in Australia to focus on moving image and practices and the application of new technologies to contemporary art. Established in 2004, in honour of Anne Landa, a former trustee of the gallery who embraced challenging art and ideas, the award is a vital platform for presenting and supporting dynamic, exploratory work that is exemplary in this area. Previous winners include: David Rosetzky 2004/5, Monika Tichacek 2006/7, TV Moore 2009, and David Haines and Joyce Hinterding 2011.

This year’s exhibition The space between us is on display at the Art Gallery of NSW until 28 July 2013 and considers the interrelation of video and performance. Guest-curated by Charlotte Day, director, Monash University Museum of Art, the exhibition features the work of artists Lauren Brincat, Alicia Frankovich, Laresa Kosloff, Angelica Mesiti, Kate Mitchell, James Newitt and Christian Thompson.

A digital publication has been produced in association with the exhibition. This publication is available via an app for iPad and includes essays, documentation of exhibited works, video, audio and other interactive features.

Notes to editor
Angelica Mesiti is a video, performance and installation artist based in Sydney and Paris. She uses cinematic filming devices to make studies of diverse human subjects in heightened states of rapture and performance. Her work Citizens Band premiered in NEW12 at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and has since also been exhibited in the Auckland Triennial, Sharjah Biennial and Kochi-Muziris Biennale (all 2013). She has also been the recipient of various awards and fellowships including The Ian Potter Moving Image Commission (2013), AFTRS Creative Fellowship Award (2011) and the 58th Blake Prize for Religious and Spiritual Art (2009).