A video installation by Australian artist Angelica Mesiti has been announced as one of the international highlights of the upcoming 5^th Auckland Triennial, a three-month festival of contemporary art beginning on the 10^th of May 2013.

The festival will also feature works by three other Australian participants: the Makeshift Collective, Sydney based inter-disciplinary artist Keg de Souza, and collaborative duo Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy, who have been announced as the first international recipients of the 2013 McCahon House Residency, a three month residency offered in partnership with the Triennial.

Exhibiting at the Auckland Art Gallery as well as Auckland’s Artspace, Angelica Mesiti will present her four-channel video installation “Citizens Band, 2012.” Recently shown at India's Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the installation consists of four short films shot in Paris and Sydney, each of which depicts traditional music being performed in an urban environment by immigrants.

“These four musicians, who are immigrants, are exceptional performers,” explained Mesiti in an interview with the New York Times. “They carried their social and cultural heritage embodied within themselves even after displacement. I think this is a way of preserving one’s cultural heritage and personal identity.”

The 5th Auckland Triennial opens in May at Auckland Art Gallery and seven additional sites, extending the Triennial’s reach across Auckland.  Curated by Hou Hanru, one of the most influential curators in the world today, the three-month festival will see local and international artists transforming Auckland spaces. The Triennial’s title and theme “If you were to live here…” offers a way artists and creative participants can inhabit and transform social spaces by producing innovative ideas, projects and works.