The first of the three-channel works features the musician-composer Uriel Barthélémi translating the Morse code message into a percussive score that permeates throughout the gallery. The second shows a unique form of dialogue and exchange between two dancers, Emilia Wibron Vesterlund and vision impaired Sindri Runudde. Together the pair has developed an intimate and corporeal language that communicates movement and gesture; Emilia guides Sindri’s understanding of choreography through the touch and feel of her body against his. The third depicts the dancer Filipe Lourenço interpreting Uriel’s
percussive sounds in a new choreography that directly references silence and vision through gestures loosely drawn from the vernacular of folk dance. This final work reveals a dialogue playing out between each of the performers, and the dots and dashes transmitted throughout the gallery produce a subtle dissonance so that the work continually slips back and forth between cohesion and dissolution. Relay League leaves a sensory impression of a language that has been transformed into a code, which in turn iterates as a score, a performance and a haptic exchange, enabling multiple acts of translation across time and space.

Mesiti’s practice chronicles our present condition. She continues to grapple with experiences such as crisis and displacement – whether economic, political, social, cultural or otherwise – and confront the emotional states of distress, vulnerability and uncertainty. Relay League invokes a fundamental humility, bringing to the surface aspects of human subjectivity that are often obscured from view. To this end, the work offers a counterpoint: more than simply making visible the forms through which language and expression are silenced, she allows these complex and vital tools of human relations to materialise in ways that emphasise our need for empathy, compassion and connection.