In Angelica Mesiti’s latest video work a Swedish choir performs Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music on a blinding white stage. But there is no sound.

The choir perform silently using nothing but their hands – they sing in sign language. Based on The Merchant of Venice, Vaughan Williams’s work sees two characters contemplate the melodies of the planets, a tune inaudible to humans, under the shade of the moon.

The Silent Choir is a voiceless lament, Mesiti’s meditation on what it feels like to be shut out – of music and the heavens. “It’s about the impossibility of hearing the music of the spheres,” says the artist over coffee at the Anna Schwartz Gallery in Sydney where her exhibition The Colour of Saying is now showing. “I thought that would be interesting to explore through a silent language.”

Viewers are forced to confront the experience of living in a noiseless world. Colour is derived not from the setting – resplendent in bright white – but from the choir’s rich (distinctly physical) human interactions. The Parisian-based Australian artist wants her audience to ask: what other ways, aside from spoken language, do we have to express ourselves?

Mesiti was inspired when she came across some students in a Paris metro station talking in sign language. “They were all gesticulating wildly, these really normal teenagers dressed in fat sneakers and backwards caps,” recalls the artist. “I was taken by how expressive their conversation was and how loud it was.”

Language marks humans out from the rest of the animal kingdom but so does the unique way we use our fingers and thumbs. Here in this video, hands stand in for speaking. With scant sound, the viewer starts to notice other things: dark nail polish on the fingers of the conductor, the sweep of eyeliner on a “singer”, a subtle nod of the head, a widening of the eyes.

Three large screens rotate three separate videos. As The Silent Choir fades, Clapping Music – featuring a couple of percussionists smacking their palms together in an escalating beat – begins. Swan Song, the final piece, sees two elderly ballet dancers pirouette a pas de deux with only their hands.

All three elements of the exhibition were originally done as a two-hour performance piece in the Swedish city of Malmö. The atmosphere was one of heightened hush and Mesiti felt it important to punctuate that pressure by leading audiences back from “the world of silence ... into the world of sound”.

That release came from the percussion of the second video, influenced by Steve Reich’s seminal 1972 composition, Clapping Music, which used the human body as an instrument. Low frequency sounds are more easily perceived by the deaf, who can often feel sound waves physically penetrate their bodies even if they can’t hear them. She noticed that hearing-impaired audience members jumped when the clapping suddenly erupted.

The 38-year-old Sydneysider is fast is becoming a video artist to watch. Of Italian origin, she now lives in Paris with her artist husband close to the Charlie Hebdo offices. Mesiti remembers the heavily armed gendarmerie around her neighbourhood on the day of the murders but also the sense of solidarity: “I feel like we saw a lot of kindness. After that violent act, there was this feeling on the nights that followed of this gentleness in the street.”

In June, Mesiti will show a work at Carriageworks in its group show 24 Frames Per Second about North Africans living in Paris. The piece explores the erotic nature of hair (particularly revealing in cultures which champion the veil) and the Berber tradition of using hair to enter a trance-like state in ceremonial wedding dances.

She is noted for her anthropological approach, using cinema to explore language, voice, and culture. For her last work, The Calling, she travelled to remote parts of Turkey, Greece, and the Canary Islands to document an ancient form of whistling language. Developed as a way to communicate across vast valleys and sky-high mountains, modernity has taken its toll. The Calling is a chronology of one language’s reduction from everyday use to tourist attraction and cultural artefact.

Swan Song, by contrast, shows a technique still employed daily by ballet dancers. The two veteran dancers – 70-year-old Jette Nejman and 84-year-old Rolf Hepp – perform a Swan Lake duet using the choreographic shortcut– mapping out moves with their hands not feet – dancers use to conserve energy and learn a piece without straining their bodies.

The pair are listening to Tchaikovsky’s majestic score on earphones, so initially they appear to be swaying in silence. Hepp almost pants as he prepares a phantom lift with just his arms, his legs and body still. The piece – at times beautiful, at others desperately sad – taps into the ballerina’s flawed pursuit of perfection that gives way to ageing bodies.

Mesiti found it difficult to find a female former dancer willing to take part; most were too self-conscious about being long past their prime. “It’s a really complex thing to get older as a ballet dancer,” she sighs. But the show, seen in another way, was a chance for Nejman and Hepp to dance once more, “another chapter for their performing live”.

At the gallery, our talk draws to a close with fading claps echoing around the room. Then Mesiti remembers one more thing. In Malmö, a blind dancer stopped next to the live performance of Swan Song, transfixed. Mesiti watched as a sighted friend took his hand to mirror the ballet dancers’ movements.

“For me that was such a memorable moment,” says the artist. “I was watching someone who has found a way to describe what he is not seeing through a physical action. It looked like they were dancing.”

• The Colour of Saying is at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney until 13 June. 24 Frames a Second is at Carriageworks, Sydney from 18 June to 2 August