Screening: Four Films by Sky Hopinka

The VAC invites you to a screening of four short films by the artist Sky Hopinka.  

Sky Hopinka’s melodious voice leads viewers through filmic landscapes made of moving images of flowing water and dense forests, written text, musical performances, and the voices of loved ones. This program’s four films—Kicking the Clouds (2021), The Island Weights (2021), Sunflower Siege Engine (2022), and Lore (2019)—consider how Indigenous identities are held and let go in each other, stories, language, and landscape. Hopkina is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians.  

In Kicking the Clouds (2021), Hopinka splices an audio recording of his grandmother taking Pechanga language lessons in the 1970s with an interview between Hopinka and his mother. These familial voices, overlayed onto footage of Whatcom County in the northern tip of Washington where his family lives.  

The Island Weights (2021) engages the story of wijirawaséwe, one of the Ho-Chunk creation stories about four water spirits who anchor the Earth’s four cardinal points. The narrator details a journey across the water and forests of the Ho-Chunk nation, in the region now demarcated and named Wisconsin, to find the northern, eastern, southern, and western water weights. 

Sunflower Siege Engine (2022) opens and closes with the sun setting over the earthen mounds of Cahokia, an ancient indigenous city in what is now known as southern Illinois. The film includes footage of an Indigenous-led occupation of Alcatraz Island held between 1969 and 1971 in which activists likened the carceral island to the U.S.’s reservation system. With a visual reference to more recent efforts to reclaim and repatriate Cahokia, thus creating continuity between the resistance of ancestors and their descendants. 

Lore (2019) closes the program. In this film, the narrator tells a story while two hands assemble, and then reassemble, several color transparency photos on the glass stage of an overhead projector. A mesmerizing reflection on how we employ media to share stories, the film concludes with a group of artists perform Bo Diddley’s “Heart-O-Matic Love.”  

This event is organized by Melissa Fandos and held in conjunction with the VAC’s current project COMMONS. Support is provided, in part, by Video Data Bank. 

About the Artist  

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and Palm Springs, California. In Portland, Oregon he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media. His work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial, the 2021 edition of Prospect.5, and the 14th Gwangju Biennial in South Korea and the Göteborg International Biennial in Switzerland in 2023. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and has had solo exhibitions at the Center for Curatorial Studies–Bard College in 2020, at LUMA in Arles, France in 2022, and in 2024 at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA and Kunsthalle Friart in Switzerland. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018- 2019, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, an Art Matters Fellow in 2019, a recipient of a 2020 Herb Alpert Award for Film/Video, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and was a 2021 Forge Project Fellow. He received the 2022 Infinity Award in Art from the International Center of Photography, is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow and was a winner of the 2023 Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is an assistant professor in the department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.