Raven Chacon: A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak

Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum/Davvi Norga Dáiddamusea is delighted to present A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak, the first solo exhibition in Europe of artist and musician Raven Chacon. On view from March 16 through September 1, 2024, A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak presents newly commissioned works, alongside important pieces from the last 25 years of Chacon’s outstanding career. A recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2023 and the first Native American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2022, Chacon works across composition, notation, installation, film and performance to highlight Indigenous resistance and empower Indigenous ways of seeing, being, thinking and doing.

The exhibition in Tromsø/Romsa is orientated along a vertical axis, starting from the street level and reaching up into the attic, a space hitherto unknown to the public. This spatialisation of the works echoes a pivotal notion to Navajo and local Sámi philosophies, which points to the vertical neighbours that exist across concurrent worlds above and below us. The works presented in the exhibition draw connections between experiences of Indigenous resistance across different continents, emphasising the shared struggles and the importance of building networks of solidarity for Indigenous empowerment. The artist’s practice generates alternative forms of making community, with and across sound, beyond Western staff notation and beyond the reach of colonialism.

Chacon has a long-standing friendship with Sámi communities, and the exhibition premieres several new works made with Sámi peers resulting from stays in the area as well as a residency at Lásságammi, the home of the legendary Sámi artist, musician and land-guardian Áillohaš (1943–2001). For Four (River Valley) (2024), Manoeuvring the Apostles (2024), and … the sky ladder (2024), emerged from collaborative undertakings with Sámi filmmakers/land guardians Marja Bål Nango and Smávut Iηgir (and their relatives in the reindeer-herding Bål Nango family) and with joikers Ingá-Máret Gaup-Juuso, Risten-Anine Gaup, Ánde Somby, and Niko Valkeapää. The beating heart of these new works lies in how they connect community and land, notation and relation. The works exist beyond the video and sculptural installations on display in the museum galleries; operating also as alternative ways of being in community, sharing knowledge, listening to each other and the land, and claiming the indivisibility between land and people.  

The prominence of women, not only in Chacon’s own life, but in the history of Native resistance to colonisation, recurs in several pieces in the exhibition. For Zitkála-Šá (2017-2020), draws its name from a Yankton Dakota woman who blazed a pioneering path as a composer, writer, translator, musician, educator and activist at the turn of the 20th century. The series features twelve musical scores (and matching texts) that honour Native American, Mestiza or First Nation women whose practice in sound, performance, composition and music struck Chacon as an essential contribution to a decolonial theory of change. Silent Choir (2016/2022) relays the tension of the resistance led by the women and the Standing Rock Sioux community that brought together hundreds of people during the No Dakota Access Pipeline Protest. Chacon’s oeuvre invites the audience to listen deeply beyond the recognisable sound of the voice to the spaces and relations in between people (often mistakenly perceived in the Western canon as silence).

Surveying his practice as an empowerment of Indigenous ways of thinking and living, A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak provides an overview of the powerful approach Chacon has developed across a variety of media to resurge community, explore the depth of Indigenous kinship to ancestral lands and pave the way for Indigenous futures.

Chacon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning orchestral composition, Voiceless Mass, will be performed in Bodø/Bådåddjo/Buvvda (during its year as European Cultural Capital) on 7 June 2024 in collaboration with the Arctic Philarmonic, and Bodø 2024. The concert will also feature Chacon’s orchestral composition, Biyan (2011), as well as performances by the Sámi composer, Elina Waage Mikalsen. A conversation at Stormen Concert Hall will take place earlier that day, between Raven Chacon and Patricia Marroquin Norby, Associate Curator of Native American Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. 

A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak is organised by Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum/Davvi Norga Dáiddamusea and the Swiss Institute, New York. The exhibition at NNKM is curated by Katya García-Antón, Director and Chief Curator of Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum/Davvi Norga Dáiddamusea. 

The first monograph dedicated to Raven Chacon’s practice is edited by Katya García-Antón, Stefanie Hessler and Alison Coplan, with texts by Raven Chacon, Aruna D´Souza, Eric-Paul Riege, Dylan Robinson and Patrick Nickleson, Anthony Huberman, Lou Cornum, Marja Bål Nango, Smávut Iŋgir, Sigbjørn Skåden, Candice Hopkins, Stefanie Hessler and Katya García-Antón. The publication is designed by Stoodio Santiago da Silva and distributed by Sternberg Press.