Sky Hopinka

Milwaukee–based visual artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. In Portland, he studied and taught Chinuk Wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His activity as a filmmaker is deeply affected by his work as a language teacher. His early digital shorts were concerned with the revitalization of the endangered linguistic lore of the Columbia River Basin through experimental techniques of narration. In his films, rigorously composed and multi-layered, Sky Hopinka explores the interconnections between language, identity, and cultural constructions while testing the limits of verbal expression. Blending epistemological and metaphysical interests, he draws from ethnographic material to create maps of dreams and memories that challenge the boundaries of the personal to branch out in the wider atlases of shared cultural memories. The peculiar fabric of images and ethno-poetic voices typical of his work destabilizes the stereotypical understanding of ›Native America‹ entrenched in the (neo-) colonial imagination.

Sky Hopinka (*1984 in Ferndale, Washington) studied at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Portland State University. He currently teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. His films were presented in several international solo and group exhibitions, including at Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota (2018); National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa, Ontario (2019); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2019); Collection Julia Stoschek, Düsseldorf, Germany (2019); Triennale Öffentliche Kunstausstellung, St. Louis, MO (2019); and Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami, FL (2018). He has been awarded the Jury Prize at the Chicago Underground Film Festival (2018) and the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (2017).