A 2023 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and the primary Native American artist to obtain the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2022, Chacon works by means of sound, video, scores, efficiency and sculpture to deal with Indigenous sovereignty and environmental justice. The present brings collectively groundbreaking works from the final 25 years with a newly commissioned sound and video set up, novel iterations of pioneering works, and a serious public artwork mural on SI’s constructing. The exhibition spans numerous geographic contexts: Sápmi (the Sámi homeland traversed by the present-day nation states of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia) and Lenapehoking, or New York, in Turtle Island. Each areas share Indigenous histories and presents that colonialism has tried to eradicate for hundreds of years. But they’re additionally websites the place resilience, or, within the phrases of cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor, survivance, continues to thrive. 

Upon coming into the exhibition, the rating American Ledger No. 1 (2018) shows a graphic meditation on the founding of america in chronological descending order. Made for sustaining and percussive devices, cash, axe and wooden, a police whistle, and a match, the piece narrates moments of contact, enactment of colonial legal guidelines, occasions of violence, the constructing of cities, appropriation of land and makes an attempt to excise Indigenous worldviews. On the middle of SI’s first ground gallery is Chacon’s sound set up, Nonetheless Life No. 3 (2015). By way of a sequence of audio system put in in a cascading arch, a lady tells the Navajo story of origins, which includes 4 worlds beneath and a number of other others above. However slightly than conceiving of the worlds beneath because the previous and the worlds above as the long run, within the linear approach that Western narratives would possibly counsel, in Navajo cosmogony these a number of worlds nonetheless, or already, exist. Elements of the creation fantasy repeat and overlap, blurring its development and permitting a number of temporalities to coexist and have an effect on each other. Additional contained in the gallery, Report (2001/2015), a composition and rating for an ensemble of firearms, punctuates silence by means of a cacophony of each energy and resistance.

On the second ground, Chacon’s new video set up For 4 (Caldera) (2024) options 4 ladies standing on a volcanic hole within the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico, studying the panorama of their pure environment and expressing what they see by means of track. Additionally on view is video documentation of the making of the newly commissioned sculpture . . . the sky ladder (2024), rising from a workshop with members of the Bål Nango household of artists, legal professionals and activists in Northern Norway. There, members drilled holes into wood planks to hint outlines of mountain ranges and different culturally important landscapes in reference to intergenerational and site-specific transference of data. For a brand new iteration of Nonetheless Life No. 4, Chacon sounded a Diné drum from the gathering of the Smithsonian Nationwide Museum of the American Indian that had not been performed in a very long time and recorded the beat, enjoying it again at listening stations at SI and elsewhere at completely different tempi starting from quick to gradual the additional every station is situated from the drum. Subject Recordings (1999) from the American Southwest enlarge sounds of silence to supply noise that reveals the vibrational patterns of those areas. As well as, all through the constructing, viewers are invited to take and carry out prints of scores. Painted as a large-scale mural on the surface façade of SI dealing with St Marks Pl, the brand new rating for Vertical Neighbors (2024) will likely be activated throughout the exhibition with a efficiency, alongside expansive public programming all through the period of the present.

“A Worm’s Eye View from a Chook’s Beak” highlights the multidisciplinary depth of Chacon’s prolific apply of the previous 25 years. Between previous, current and future, silence and noise, violence and resilience, Chacon’s work proposes new in addition to historical methods of relating by means of which different politics could also be glimpsed.  

at Swiss Institute, New York
till April 14, 2024