Featuring Raven Chacon, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, performer, and Diné artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, and the 2026 RISING x RMIT Sound Artist in Residence, the discussion situates contemporary sonic practice within broader struggles over sovereignty and knowledge. Chacon’s work spans composition, installation, and performance, often engaging sound as a medium through which histories of violence, resistance, and endurance are made audible.
Joining him are Hayden Ryan, a Yuin–Walbunja sound artist, researcher and RMIT School of Design PhD candidate whose practice uses spatial sound to explore Indigenous identity, history, and relationships to place, and Dr Kimberley Moulton, a Yorta Yorta curator and writer, Senior Curator of Exhibitions at RISING, and recently held tenure as the Adjunct Curator Indigenous Art Tate Modern (2023-2026). She holds a PhD in curatorial practice from Monash University Melbourne and in 2023 was made Curator Emeritus at Museums Victoria.
Together, the panel will explore how Indigenous sonic artists are forging new modes of listening that resist the extractive logics of colonialism, while opening up sound as a site of cultural continuity, relationality, and renewal.
Moderated by Dr Joel Stern, researcher, curator, and lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT.
Presented by RMIT University, RISING and PRS Australia.
'Portable Stillness' (2025), is an ongoing spatial installation that explores how the making of miniature objects and floating altar-like displays can express memory, collection, and the domestic in transition. Motivated by the instability of diasporic living and continual relocation, Ko Jou Chen constructs handmade structures that carry memory and presence across her shifting environments.
'Slip' is a practice-led research project that explores the poetic qualities of the bluestones that have been discarded in recent construction works around RMIT University. Through the process of moulding and casting these stones into beeswax, Noah Bridger hopes to reimagine Melbourne’s urban landscape.
Chloe Rose Thomas’ exhibition, 'Can I Hold You?' centres on queer community and embodied practices of care, exploring what it means to take traditional photographic portraits of non-normative bodies and the histories they represent.
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.
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