Voices of the Land: Videos by Sky Hopinka

A selection of experimental video works by artist Sky Hopinka, bridging themes of indigenous culture through the exploration of landscape and personal identity, often focusing on the ancestral language of his elders, of which Sky is among only a handful of his generation to be fluent and active in its study.

PROGRAM

Kunįkága Remembers Red Banks, Kunįkága Remembers the Welcome Song
2014 | 9.5 minutes

The video traverses the history and the memory of a place shared by both the Hočąk and the settler. Red Banks, a pre-contact Hočąk village site near present day Green Bay, WI was also the site of Jean Nicolet’s landing, who in 1634 was the first European in present day Wisconsin. Images and text are used to explore this space alongside my grandmother’s recollections. Each serve as representations of personal and shared memory, as well as representations of practices and processes of remembrance, from the Hočąk creation story, to Jean Nicolet’s landing, to the present.

Jáaji Approx.
2015 | 7.5 minutes

Logging and approximating a relationship between audio recordings of my father and videos gathered of the landscapes we have both separately traversed. The initial distance between the logger and the recordings, of recollections and of songs, new and traditional, narrows while the images become an expanding semblance of filial affect. Jáaji is a near translation for directly addressing a father in the Hočak language.

Visions of an Island
2016 | 15 minutes

An Unangam Tunuu elder describes cliffs and summits, drifting birds, and deserted shores. A group of students and teachers play and invent games revitalizing their language. A visitor wanders in a quixotic chronicling of earthly and supernal terrain. These visions offer glimpses of an island in the center of the Bering Sea.

I'll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You'll Become
2016 | 12.5 minutes

An elegy to Diane Burns on the shapes of mortality, and being, and the forms the transcendent spirit takes while descending upon landscapes of life and death. A place for new mythologies to syncopate with deterritorialized movement and song, reifying old routes of reincarnation. Where resignation gives hope for another opportunity, another form, for a return to the vicissitudes of the living and all their refractions.

“I’m from Oklahoma I ain’t got no one to call my own.
If you will be my honey, I will be your sugar pie way hi ya way ya hi ya way ya hi yo”

-Diane Burns (1957-2006)

Dislocation Blues
2017 | 17 minutes

An incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections from Standing Rock. Cleo Keahna recounts his experiences entering, being at, and leaving the camp and the difficulties and the reluctance in looking back with a clear and critical eye. Terry Running Wild describes what his camp is like, and what he hopes it will become.

This program is supported in part by the London Arts Council through the City of London’s Community Arts Investment Program.