SKY HOPINKA
Dislocation Blues, 2017
HD video, stereo, color
16:57
RIVERSIDE PARK
The inclusion of Sky Hopinka’s work Dislocation Blues reflects this exhibition’s exploration of power and resistance and specifically acknowledges the Canadian context of national Wet'suwet'en protests opposing resource extraction on Indigenous land. Dislocation Blues offers a view into the grassroots Dakota Access Pipeline protests. These protests began in early 2016 in reaction to the approved construction of Energy Transfer Partners' Dakota Access Pipeline in the northern United States. The pipeline was projected to run under part of Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Many in the Standing Rock tribe and surrounding communities consider the pipeline to constitute a serious threat to the region's water. The construction is also seen as a direct threat to ancient burial grounds and cultural sites of historic importance.
Sky Hopinka characterizes his video as “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.”
In the context of an overabundance of cameras documenting the people, actions and violence of this place and time, Hopinka’s video attempts to tell stories that are multidimensional and complicated, providing a critical lens during a time of “fake news” and “false truth.” His video offers space to question how we remember collectively and as individuals. The title of the video reflects Hopinka’s sense of personal dislocation in this context:
“After each visit I made to Standing Rock the best word I could find to describe the experience to friends and family was ‘dislocated’. I felt dislocated when I was there, as an Indigenous person on land that was tribal, but not of my tribe. To be amongst people that were just like me, who were so familiar but different. To try and figure out where I fit in with a camera and a purpose that was never about journalistic integrity, but about being useful and true to myself and my beliefs. It was hard to locate myself amongst so many swirling ideas and ideologies, but the conversation with Cleo helped. “
His work speaks to larger subjectivities at play during such a public and historic event. He reflects, “Finding others that are just as alone as you are makes navigating the longitudes and latitudes of post-colonial America that much easier to bear.”
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 nonfiction forms of media. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his Masters in Fine Arts in Film, Video, Animation and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
His work has 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, 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 awarded jury prizes at the Onion City Film Festival, the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, and the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists in the Emerging artist category for 2018. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018-2019, the Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019 and is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.
Sky Hopinka
Dislocation Blues, 2017
HD video, stereo, color
courtesy of the Artist
Photos: Frank Luca