The flag-score that opens composer and sound-artist Raven Chacon’s exhibition at Swiss Institute—featuring work made over the past twenty-five years alongside a new sound and video installation—is a miniature portrait of his career. American Ledger No. 1 (Army Blanket) (2020), a graphic history of the United States in the form of an army blanket, is embossed with icons of waves, flames, police whistles, wood-chopping axes, and a fractured city skyline. Chacon’s main interests are all there: notation in the expanded field, the interplay of various mediums, the embeddedness of sound and landscape, and the malleability of map and territory. Working with post-Cagean aesthetics yet advancing them within a Diné/Navajo context, Chacon’s work suggests that notation is an imposition onto sound comparable to colonialism’s imposition onto the land. The opening room contains the installation Still Life No. 3 (2015), in which a series of glass panels mounted onto the walls and engraved with white fonts tell the Diné Bahane’ creation myth, which describes the birth of light and color in worlds below ours, the raising of the waters, and the formation of mountains and celestial bodies. The transparent and reflective surface makes the glossy text intentionally difficult to read, as though …

A short clip functions as the backdrop for Sable Elyse Smith’s multimedia project in three issues—“FEAR TOUCH POLICE”—commissioned by the Swiss Institute and exhibited on a dedicated website. It is roughly 18 seconds of footage showing a solitary car parked by the side of a road at night engulfed in flame. After 14 seconds the car explodes, the camera jolts and then restabilizes. Then the clip resets. The fire is omnipresent as I scroll down through the five entries that make up “Issue one: FEAR.” I zoom into Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s poem, which is printed in infinitesimal letters to the right of the screen, and the fire is there. It explodes around the edges of the embedded screen on which plays Johan Grimonprez’s classic montage film dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997). “If you are reading this, then you have found yourself in a time consumed by crisis,” writes Jessica Lynne in her contribution entitled “A letter written on a day without the sun,” and the car explodes in the background. Several paragraphs later she writes about her wish for a “place that is not riddled with food insecurity or housing instability or extrajudicial murder or…” and the car explodes again. Neither …