Sky Hopinka | 83 minutes | 6:30pm, Thursday 18 October at the Institute of Modern Art
This free screening, The Cloven World of Sky Hopinka, is presented as a partnership between Queensland Film Festival and the Institute of Modern Art.
Of the Ho-Chunk & Pechanga Tribes, Hopinka’s work is structurally marked by a series of interlocking divides—linguistic, temporal, mythical and memory—made manifest by cloven imagery: bifurcated landscapes, textual overlays and riven recollections. These seven shorts trace out Hopinka’s rapidly evolving form and tactics before culminating in two shorts, Dislocation Blues and Fainting Spells, responding to the aftermath of the Standing Rock protests.
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wawa | Sky Hopinka | 2014, 6 minutes
Featuring speakers of chinuk wawa, an Indigenous language from the Pacific Northwest, Wawa begins slowly, patterning various forms of documentary and ethnography. Quickly, the patterns tangle and become confused and commingled, while translating and transmuting ideas of cultural identity, language, and history.
Courtesy of Sky Hopinka
Jáaji Approx. | Sky Hopinka | 2015, 8 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.
Courtesy of Sky Hopinka
Visions of an Island | Sky Hopinka | 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.
Courtesy of Sky Hopinka
I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become | Sky Hopinka | 2016, 13 minutes
An elegy to poet Diane Burns (of the Chemehuevi & Anishinabe) 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 deterritorialised 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.
Courtesy of Sky Hopinka
Anti-Objects, Or Space Without Path or Boundary | Sky Hopinka | 2017, 13 minutes
“The individual is not an autonomous, solitary object but a thing of uncertain extent, with ambiguous boundaries. So too is matter, which loses much of its allure the moment it is reduced to an object, shorn of its viscosity, pressure and density. Both subject and matter resist their reduction into objects. Everything is interconnected and intertwined.” —– Kengo Kuma
The title of this video, taken from the texts of the architect Kengo Kuma, suggests a way of looking at everything as “interconnected and intertwined.” Images and representations of two structures in the Portland Metropolitan Area that have direct and complicated connections to the Chinookan people who inhabit(ed) the land are woven with audio tapes of one of the last speakers of the Chinookan creole, chinuk wawa.
Courtesy of Sky Hopinka
Dislocation Blues | Sky Hopinka | 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.
Courtesy of Sky Hopinka
Fainting Spells | Sky Hopinka | 2018, 11 minutes
Told through recollections of youth, learning, lore, and departure, this is an imagined myth for the Xąwįska, or the Indian Pipe Plant – used by the Ho-Chunk to revive those who have fainted.
Courtesy of Sky Hopinka
Unrated 15+