SKY HOPINKA: ETHNOPOETIC VISIONS
Virtual Program, Wednesday-Sunday, September 16-20, 2020
Conversation: Sky Hopinka with Adam Piron - Friday, September 18, 5pm CST
Listen to a recording of this conversation between Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians)and filmmaker/curator Adam Piron (Kiowa/Mohawk) posted below.
https://www.mixcloud.com/aurorapictureshow/aurora-conversation-sky-hopinka-with-adam-piron/
Aurora is pleased to present a curated program of short films by artist Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians). Hopinka combines documentary and experimental practices to create unique “ethnopoetic” works, as he’s described them. His films find personal connections to Indigenous culture through creative explorations between land and language, mythology and memory, dream and reality, place and displace, life and death. Aurora’s 65-minute program, available to stream for free during it’s 5-day run on our website, includes six short films made 2015-2019: Fainting Spells, When You’re Lost In The Rain, Jáaji Approx., Lore, Dislocation Blues, and I’ll Remember You As You Were, Not What You’ll Become. On Friday, Sept. 18, we will present a conversation between Sky Hopinka and Adam Piron (Sundance Film Festival) about Hopinka’s work and process, and the Indigenous film collective COUSIN that they’re both involved with.
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington, and has lived in Palm Springs and Riverside, California; Portland, Oregon; Milwaukee, WI; and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hopinka’s experimental films have been shown at numerous festivals including Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, ImagineNATIVE Media+Arts Festival, Images, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and Projections, as well as museum exhibitions including the 2017 Whitney Biennial. His first feature-length film, maɬni—towards the ocean, towards the shore, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this January. He was a 2018–19 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.
Adam Piron (Kiowa/Mohawk) is Assistant Curator for Film at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Programmer of short films at the Sundance Film Festival’s, Associate Film Programmer at AFI Fest, and serves on the Programming Committee of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. He was formerly Manager for Sundance Institute’s Indigenous Program. Piron is also a filmmaker. Allapatah (2019)–a short documentary he co-directed with Adam Khalil about alligator wrestling and the Seminole Tribe of Florida–premiered in Miami in December. Piron recently co-founded the collective, COUSIN, with Sky Hopinka, Adam Khalil, and Alexandra Lazarowich, to support personal and provocative film/video experiments by Indigenous artists.
