Place Where the Waters Crossed
September 3 to November 1, 2025
Place Where the Waters Crossed
Raven Chacon
Curator: Marie-Ann Yemsi
Exhibition presented by MOMENTA Biennale d’art contemporain and produced in collaboration with the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery
Place Where the Waters Crossed, an exhibition by Raven Chacon, a composer and multidisciplinary artist from the Diné (Navajo) Nation, brings together a recent corpus of sound and performative works that explore how Indigenous stories circulate, inhabit the body, and are passed on. Through an experimental sonic approach, Chacon highlights marginalized histories and identities, revealing what is often left out of the frame. The exhibition opens up an active listening space in which environmental justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and collective memory converge, tracing a sensitive cartography of Indigenous struggles and survivance in the face of dominant power structures.
Place Where the Waters Crossed, an exhibition by Raven Chacon, a composer and multidisciplinary artist from the Diné (Navajo) Nation, brings together a recent corpus of sound and performative works that explore how Indigenous stories circulate, inhabit the body, and are passed on. Through an experimental sonic approach, Chacon highlights marginalized histories and identities, revealing what is often left out of the frame. The exhibition opens up an active listening space in which environmental justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and collective memory converge, tracing a sensitive cartography of Indigenous struggles and survivance in the face of dominant power structures.
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist born in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. A recording artist for twenty-two years, he has appeared on over eighty releases on national and international labels. He has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, the Whitney Biennial, Borealis Festival, SITE SANTA FE, the Kennedy Center, and other venues. As an educator, he is the senior composer mentor for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass, and in 2023 he received the MacArthur Fellowship.
About the 19th edition of the Biennale
In a world saturated with images, some, strangely, are lacking. This edition of MOMENTA aims to open up multiple perspectives for experimentation and speculation on the nature, uses, and production of missing images. In Praise of the Missing Image explores both contemporary challenges in relation to the image and the current consequences of the complex dynamics involved in constructing narratives. Which stories are told, how, and by whom?