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.
