Sky Hopinka’s work is a sustained engagement with the cosmologies of Indigenous North America. In these cultures, the dead are not gone but relocated in language, landscape, and breath. Hopinka’s deeply spiritual films operate, in writer Julie Niemi’s words, as “offerings, built from repetition, rhythm, and voice. The sacred appears in flickers and in structure: as what holds and exceeds the frame.”
In this two-channel video, verses from a poem written by the artist are presented alongside scenes from a powwow. Emcee Ruben Little Head deftly guides the event’s audience—and the viewer—through the performance of a series of Northern Traditional dances. Footage in the video’s second channel is abstracted by one of Hopinka’s signature treatments, a formalist technique that forces the viewer to reflect upon their own position as observers of these rituals. The poem is superimposed onto this transformed image.
From its embodied camerawork to its formal experiment, Hopinka’s video explores means of “relating to and listening to the beings and ancestors,” in Niemi’s words. Working against the presumption that heritage can only be preserved through its incarceration in museums, Subterranean Moon also calls into question the many other means by which minority cultures are confined.
