Sky Hopinka (b. 1984) is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin, United States, and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians from Southern California. Through his work, which includes photography, video, and texts, Hopinka explores different ways to question the complexity of contemporary Indigenous identity. His community inspires his artistic practice, and his work is clearly a way of resisting the ethnographic gaze that seeks to delimit, define, and determine what is and is not authentic. Ethnography is a branch of anthropology that relies on categories for data gathering, beginning from the immersive and long-lasting approach to the subject ethnic group, usually performed by a researcher that is an outsider to that community.

Hopinka defines his work as an ethnopoetic reflection, referring to a concept proposed by the American writer and translator Eliot Weinberger in his 1992 essay “The Camera People.” Ethnopoetics is a concept that addresses the essential—and long denied in ethnographic filmmaking—conflict between the filmmaker and the filmed subject. Ethnopoetics would happen when communities that have been observed, studied, and filmed by white Western ethnographers decide to pick up the cameras and film themselves, which they deem necessary and relevant. Thus, these communities subvert the notion of the exempt outside observer (the traditional ethnographer) to embrace the idea of the engaged and involved participant in the subject group.

Two of Hopinka’s films are shown here: Kicking the Clouds (2021) and Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021). Both demonstrate through landscape, music, and language, the persistence of ancestral traditions and practices that have survived systems of oppression, evolving and assuming new forms that express the complexity of Amerindian communities in the United States today.

Video room: Sky Hopinka is curated by María Inés Rodríguez, modern and contemporary art curator-at-large, MASP