We are thrilled to welcome acclaimed filmmaker Sky Hopinka to the Center for Ethnographic Media Arts as part of our Visiting Artist Series. Join us Thursday, February 20th, for a screening and Q&A of a collection of his short films (details below), followed by an artist talk with Sky Hopinka on Friday, February 21st (seperate event here).

Just a Soul Responding
Short Films by Sky Hopinka

Visions of an Island, 2016
An Unangam Tunuu elder describes cliffs and summits, drifting birds, and deserted shore
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.

Sunflower Siege Engine, 2022
Moments of resistance are collapsed and woven together; from documentation of the Indigenous led
occupation of Alcatraz, to the reclamation of Cahokia and the repatriation of the ancestors, to one’s
reflections on their body as they exist in the world today, These are gestures that meditate on the carcer inception and nature of the reservation system, and where sovereignty and belligerence intersect and diverge.

Kicking the Clouds, 2021
This film is a reflection on descendants and ancestors, guided by a 50 year old audio recording o
grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother. After being given this tape by my mother, I interviewed her and asked about it, and recorded her ruminations on their lives and her own. The footage is of our chosen home in Whatcom County, Washington, where my family still lives, far from our homelands in Southern California, yet a home nonetheless.

Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary, 2017
“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”, as are the historical and the present, the tool and the artifact. 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. These localities of matter resist their reduction into objects, and call anew for space and time given to wandering as a deliberate act and the empowerment of shared utility.

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland 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, Ann Arbor, Courtisane Festival, Punto de Vista, and the New York Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial and Prospect.5 in 2021. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and participated in Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He has had a solo exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in 2020 and in 2022 at LUMA in Arles, France. He is the recipient of the Infinity Award in A from the International Center and the Alpert Award for Film/Video and fellowships including The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Sundance Art of Nonfiction, Art Matters, The Guggenheim Foundation, and The Forge Project. In the fall of 2022, Hopinka received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work as a visual artist and filmmaker.

Sky Hopinka in-person with a Q&A to follow the films.

February 20th, 2025
Doors at 5:30 PM, films begins at 6:00 PM.
Runtime 75 min. 

USC School of Cinematic Arts Complex
Room SCI 106 
900 W 34th St, Los Angeles, CA 90007

FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO ALL USC STUDENTS, FACULTY, STAFF, ALUMNI, AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC.

RSVP to [email protected]

This event is co-sponsored by USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts and USC School of Cinematic Arts.