Exhibition Review: <i>Sky Hopinka: Unforgiven Souls Sing Hymns</i>

Elements of representation, attention, time, and text are all part of the work of Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians), and how these are interrelated is investigated in his recent solo show Unforgiven Souls Sing Hymns. Hopinka’s multidisciplinary works are comprised of film, video, photography, and writing. This show included photographic works and a video titled Subterranean Moon (2024). Hopinka’s work refuses to speak to cinema, seeing, and photography on colonial representational terms, established among other means as the result of the confluence of colonialism, positivism, acceleration, and technocracy. Instead, Hopinka produces film and photography different from art that stems from those violent traditions, making work “that affirms Indigenous realities on their own terms.”1Hopinka’s work is the opposite of spectacular, producing a sort of not-spectacular or antispectacular. Paul Virilio writes, “It was to be in…Los Angeles that the American nation was to pursue, ‘by other means,’ its endless race, its journey of no return. With westerns, trail movies, road movies, burlesques, musicals, and its most recent productions, it created a cinema of acceleration, capable of restoring the highest velocity to an ‘authentic Americanization.’”2 Hopinka’s photographs and videos deaccelerate cinema, seeing, and photography; they formally contest these terms by refusing the representational high velocity that in many instances authenticates settler colonialism. This deacceleration might have embodied affects tied to attention. As the artist has said,I’m hoping to overwhelm to a point of like surrender, like you don’t need to understand everything that’s going on, you don’t need to read every single word. You can pick up these bits and phrases, you can wander around the screen and you can come back to it if your mind wanders. I think this relationship to attention is really important, where you don’t need to be hyper focused on every single thing.3Visitors to Hopinka’s exhibition entered a show that doesn’t command ocular attention as representation and seeing is not tied to the reaffirmation and authenticity of the settler colonial way of seeing and viewing—where perspectival and linear narratives might be best understood as cognitive coercion. This is especially poignant in a solo show held on the lands of the Lenape, where private galleries and museums play into a strong visual economy of overstimulated attention. As Hopinka’s practice doesn’t provide anything spectacularly or singularly ocular, this exhibition might have remained impenetrable if viewers hadn’t been able to suspend their assumptions about colonial notions of attention and viewing. The exhibition was also dimly lit in order to provide a suitable environment for viewing the video and as a result the affect communicated by the photographs was heightened, adding to how the works are anti-spectacular as opposed to spectacularizing.Hopinka’s photographic work affects the movement and time of the viewer. The work does this at a cognitive level, with the viewer spending more time reading, and at an unconscious level when the compositions of the photographs make the eye wander—as opposed to, for example, perspectival ways of representing where the eyes wander less. Some elements that make up the formal complexities of these works—including the grain, focus, and texture—are so heavily worked on and played with that the photographs don’t impose visual attention, producing instead an unconscious affect, of a sort of lack of closure and release, a lack of typified affect. The heavy grain and rich texture are formalist decisions in the photographic process that add a vibrancy and movement to the assumed flatness of each photograph’s formal qualities. Lastly, these photoworks produce the anti-spectacular because the play with texture, focus, and grain doesn’t let the viewer typify and visually take in the image in the same way as if it was perfectly focused with a high aperture, and printed in a way that highlighted those photographic conventions.As the contemporary circulation and production of images continues to follow the history of photography based on types, where even framing and focus act as type, Hopinka’s photographs prove that there are ways of doing images of so-called “subjects” in ways that do not violently scrutinize through the use of a positivist epistemology. For example, not using the grain of the photograph in a positivist manner is a profound gesture against that positivist history of photography. The writing, specifically the handwriting in each image, merges with the texture, grain, and focus in a way that doesn’t let the viewer separate the image from the text, incorporating as opposed to typifying a specific aspect of the work.The two-panel photograph Hiharuwąkeja (2024) (pronounced “Hee-ha-rue-wah-kay-ja”) could be typified as a landscape, but as the land and clouds of the specific place depicted is brought to the surface, through formal decisions that oppose a positivist use of photography, it undoes certain conventions of the “landscape” as a type. On the photograph, the text spreads across both images, reading:When we were young and full of fearlessness of futures long distant and unknown and faraway. / Where we thought we’d lay we lie no more. / When we thought we’d rest instead we’re hurried towards an end that is damned and damning. / Unforgiven souls sing hymns without worry of sacrament and sin.Somatic aspects connected to awareness and consciousness are highlighted in a subtle way in the text, further rejecting bodily affects of western positivist progression. By producing what can be categorized as landscape photography, and de-centering perspective vision—as the importance of perspectival effect—the writing brings the viewer back to themself. The formal qualities already mentioned in Hopinka’s photographic work undo cinema’s traveling gaze.4Hihižąkicųšgųnįeja (2024) (pronounced “Hee-hee-zha-key-chu-sh-goon-ee-eh-ja”) is a three-panel photo-based work. The first panel depicts a place understood as the specificity of land, whereas, as mentioned above, the treatment and formal qualities of the work equalize the effect of each inch of the photograph. The third panel shows a very similar image as the middle panel. The middle of the three panels is flipped as if it were upside down, and while we see in it the same landscape as in the first and third panels, in this and the third image a group of people appear to take pictures of themselves and the landscape, near a sign reading “CAUTION ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.” Across the three images is written:[left panel] And here we are laughing again and again. Let yourself go and let yourself free and let yourself out because at the end of the end it’s you and it’s me. The you and the me [middle panel] and the “we” we choose when there’s no one left when the bodies are hot when the bones are dry gone buried and dug up taken from the light underneath and above. / When we’re done wandering I’ll bury you again, Passenger Ghost, / At a fork in the river [right panel] where the red oaks grow. Make yourself a lodge in preparation for a long winter. We’ll say hello and I love you and I’ll see you sometime soon when the songs are loud and when aunty is loud and when we’re singing trashy songs loud and when we’re talking about the old way loudHihižąkicųšgųnįeja seems to be speaking about the affective complexities of people entering an area at their “own risk” to take photographs.In the two-channel video Subterranean Moon the artist speaks about social relations that produce movement as a non-typified plurality—as opposed to a diversity of types. The video includes written text from Denizens of Hell, as well as sound and image from a powwow Hopinka organized for the purpose of filming it. About the delicate and complex approach of being a “filmmaker of color who is filming their own community” Hopinka has said, “Once you start to eschew certain standards or expectations that are placed upon you, especially as an Indigenous person or any sort of filmmaker of color who is filming their own community, there’s a lot to think about: exploitation, representation, who is holding the camera, who is in front of the camera.”5The left channel of the video is a single shot, a decision that speaks to the ethics of Hopinka’s recording. As the edit was not constructed out of dozens of takes, it instead prioritizes the participants of the powwow over the ocular. The viewer can see dancers of all ages wearing Indigenous regalia. But the same attention is given to other elements: social relations, non-performing participants, drummers, and the emcee. In addition, Hopinka is an embodied person in the space, and as he is filming the single take he is also being filmed, spoken to, and related to. In this way, the film cancels out disembodied notions of cinema’s camera, where the person holding the camera gets erased, which is especially poignant in relation to colonial and modernist discourses. The editing, camera movement, sound, and other formal decisions prioritize some of the social relations that formed this powwow as much as the dancers, the dances, and the dancers’ regalia. The movement of the camera, the movement of the dancers, the other participants, the emcee, and other aspects of the powwow are all part of what Hopinka is recording; there is no one aspect that is spectacularized while other aspects get invisibilized. Among many other things the artist has said about powwows, he has stated that they are “ways for native people to practice being together, in ways that [are] deemed safe, acceptable by the government…we weren’t free to practice our own religion until the 70s.”6On the right channel of the video, Hopinka edits in parts of poems as intertitles, uses a different camera angle, leaves the screen blank, and includes compelling visual abstractions of movement. For example, at the moment the left channel shows dancing, the other channel is showing the drum circle making the music for the dance, but at times the footage of the drummers is edited with effects, so the viewer can just perceive the movement of the drumsticks while everything else is abstracted. Lines from Hopinka’s poems on the screen further undo linear narratives that mimic perspectival vision; instead, the poems bring the viewer back to their body, their relations, and their own life. Excerpts from the artist’s poems incorporated into the video read:When the dance is all over and it’s time for us to leave, / silence settles.…circling a time without a gaze / and a time without eyes glazed over, / emptied of sorrow and the complex pleasures / of years well lived.…Can you find a movement that makes you move like our language, / languid and slow?7Sky Hopinka creates photographs and videos that exist in a non-dialectical position—contrary to some underlooked aspects of modernism, rejecting modernist speed as well as modernist and positivist representational heuristics.