FIFA is honoured to offer a Carte Blanche to imagineNATIVE, the world’s largest presenter of Indigenous screen content, who has chosen to put forward the work of visual artist, filmmaker, and educator Sky Hopinka.
Original. Indigenous.
imagineNATIVE is the world’s largest presenter of Indigenous screen content. The organization is recognized locally, nationally, and internationally for excellence and innovation in programming and as the global centre for Indigenous film and media arts. We are committed to creating a greater understanding of Indigenous peoples and cultures through the presentation of contemporary Indigenous-made media art including film, video, audio and digital media.
Program: Indigenous Experimental Cinema — Talk
by Sky Hopinka
A reflection, a proposition
Framing the image and considering intention, composition, and transference, Sky Hopinka reflects notions around Indigenous experimental cinema through a personal artist-talk.
Indigenous Experimental Cinema — Talk was commissioned by imagineNATIVE for the 2020 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and curated by artistic director Niki Little.
From the Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, Hopinka’s practice 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. Hopinka offers questions that counter dominant narratives of Indigeneity, experimental, and cinema within this talk. Like a gesture, Hopinka invites the viewer to ask for considerations around context, power, and audience. We journey through his early work wawa [talk/discourse/dialogue/murmur] from 2014. We see layers of language, translation, and interpretation and move towards later work that reveals relations and approximations that inform ways of being in his 2015 film Jáaji Approx. Hopinka is generous with thought and reference points; words, text, and imagery are intentional and like a non-linear trace almost circling back unto itself. Narratives become responses, the visual structure becomes unbound as Hopinka leaves us with an offer of curiosity towards story and cinema.
Original. Indigenous.
imagineNATIVE is the world’s largest presenter of Indigenous screen content. The organization is recognized locally, nationally, and internationally for excellence and innovation in programming and as the global centre for Indigenous film and media arts. We are committed to creating a greater understanding of Indigenous peoples and cultures through the presentation of contemporary Indigenous-made media art including film, video, audio and digital media.
Program: Indigenous Experimental Cinema — Talk
by Sky Hopinka
A reflection, a proposition
Framing the image and considering intention, composition, and transference, Sky Hopinka reflects notions around Indigenous experimental cinema through a personal artist-talk.
Indigenous Experimental Cinema — Talk was commissioned by imagineNATIVE for the 2020 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and curated by artistic director Niki Little.
From the Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, Hopinka’s practice 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. Hopinka offers questions that counter dominant narratives of Indigeneity, experimental, and cinema within this talk. Like a gesture, Hopinka invites the viewer to ask for considerations around context, power, and audience. We journey through his early work wawa [talk/discourse/dialogue/murmur] from 2014. We see layers of language, translation, and interpretation and move towards later work that reveals relations and approximations that inform ways of being in his 2015 film Jáaji Approx. Hopinka is generous with thought and reference points; words, text, and imagery are intentional and like a non-linear trace almost circling back unto itself. Narratives become responses, the visual structure becomes unbound as Hopinka leaves us with an offer of curiosity towards story and cinema.
2020 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, Canada (2020), world premiere
| Director | Sky Hopinka |
In Partnership with
Image tirée du film Talk // Image from the film Talk
Production
Sky Hopinka
Sky Hopinka is a video artist, filmmaker, and teacher of Chinuk Wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. A Ho-Chunk Nation national and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, Hopinka has had his work played at various festivals including imagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sundance, and Projections. His work was a part of the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial and the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the 2018 FRONT Triennial. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and was a part of Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. 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, a recipient of an Alpert Award for Film/Video, and is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.
Biographical notes provided by the film production team
Biographical notes provided by the film production team
malni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (2020)
Lore (2019)
Fainting Spells (2018)
Dislocation Blues (2017)
Visions of an Island (2016)
Jaaji Approx (2015)
wawa (2014)
Lore (2019)
Fainting Spells (2018)
Dislocation Blues (2017)
Visions of an Island (2016)
Jaaji Approx (2015)
wawa (2014)
