Sky Hopinka
Site: Communications Depot + Don’s Muffler Shop
Filmmaker Sky Hopinka screens a pairing of films embedded in spaces of waiting and repair - Jáaji Approx. plays at Communications Depot, a phone repair shop, and Wawa plays at Don’s Muffler Shop during both shop’s open hours. The responsive siting of the films engage questions of translation, migration, and language loss among Indigenous communities, subtly inserting these questions outward into a street named after the displaced Cherokee peoples and onto a region once the site of the largest pre-Columbian city in present day United States.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, Milwaukee, WI, and is currently based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture, and the play between the known and the unknowable. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019.
His work has played at various festivals including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sundance, Antimatter, Chicago Underground Film Festival, FLEXfest, and Projections. His work was a part of the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial, 2018 FRONT Triennial, and the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Hopinka will additionally serve as a guest curator for the film program at the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
