Lorenza Longhi: World of Yum Yum
January 25–April 14, 2024
Raven Chacon: A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak
SI is pleased to present A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak, Raven Chacon’s first major institutional solo exhibition, organized in partnership with Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum in Tromsø, Norway. A 2023 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and the first Native American artist to receive the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2022, Chacon works through sound, video, scores, performance and sculpture to address Indigenous sovereignty and environmental justice. The show brings together groundbreaking works from the last 25 years with a newly commissioned sound and video installation, novel iterations of pioneering works, and a major public art mural on SI’s building. The exhibition spans diverse 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. Both locations share Indigenous histories and presents that colonialism has attempted to eradicate for centuries. Yet they are also sites where resilience, or, in the words of cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor, survivance, continues to thrive.
A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak highlights the multidisciplinary depth of Chacon’s prolific practice. Between past, present and future, silence and noise, violence and resilience, Chacon’s work proposes new as well as ancient ways of relating through which alternative politics may be glimpsed.
Chacon’s first monograph, published by Swiss Institute, Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum and Sternberg Press, will be launched on the occasion of the exhibition. The book includes newly commissioned contributions by Lou Cornum, Aruna D’Souza, Candice Hopkins, Anthony Huberman, Marja Bål Nango and Smávot Ingir, Patrick Nickleson and Dylan Robinson, Eric-Paul Riege, Ánde Somby, and Sigbjørn Skåden, with an introductory text by editors (with Alison Coplan) Katya García-Antón and Stefanie Hessler.
Raven Chacon: A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Generous support is provided by Becky and David Gochman. Support for Vertical Neighbors is provided by the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation. The catalogue is made possible through the support of the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, with additional support from the Leon Polk Smith Foundation. Spora is made possible through Teiger Foundation.
This exhibition is organized by Stefanie Hessler, Director, and Alison Coplan, Chief Curator.
Lorenza Longhi: World of Yum Yum
SI presents World of Yum Yum, the first solo exhibition in the US by artist Lorenza Longhi, featuring newly commissioned paintings and sculptures in a site-specific installation. Through architectural interventions and a visual language that enlists both strategies of luxury advertising, merchandising and commerce, along with craft and DIY techniques, Longhi’s work considers spaces of display and the desires they engender. Taking its inspiration from a temporary exhibition space that Longhi encountered in an airport, World of Yum Yum features a series of hyperreal closeups of artificial hand-made flowers, reminiscent of Chanel brooches, on movable panels that hang from tracks on the ceiling. Appearing as blown-up photographs pasted like posters and silk-screened with overlay patterns of flower outlines and dots, each brooch’s center holds a spy camera that peeps outwards.
“Rigorously speaking, no one wants to be subject of the gaze, we all want to be fabulous objects,” critic Rhonda Lieberman writes in a 1992 essay entitled The Loser Thing. “Commodities promise to lift and separate people from feelings of inadequacy and unloveliness, but they can also betray us, give us dirty looks, and make us feel unworthy of them.”[1] The eyes of the camellias affixed to Longhi’s panels can shift within the hanging apparatus, opening new spaces and gaps for visibility or escape. While some stare directly, others give a side-eye squint. Let’s get personal, they seem to suggest.
[1] Rhonda Lieberman, “The Loser Thing,” Artforum, September 1992, p. 80.
SI gratefully acknowledges the Lorenza Longhi Exhibition Circle for its support of the show.
This exhibition is organized by Alison Coplan, Chief Curator.
