Sky Hopinka: Screening and Discussion

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Saturday, May 9, 2026 at 3pm for a screening and discussion with Sky Hopinka. Alongside a selection of his films, the afternoon brings together works by Fox Maxy, Tyson Houseman, darylina powderface, and Svetlana Romanova, selected by Hopinka as points of affinity and dialogue.

Hopinka’s work has been shaped by the artist's relation to Indigenous landscape and language. Having studied and taught Chinuk Wawa, a language Indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin, Hopinka has described language as foundational to how he approaches video and storytelling. His films are often characterized as poetic non-fiction, resisting the expectation that Indigenous stories must be made fully legible to an outside viewer. This program extends the artist's concerns through a group of works focusing on ancestral land, kinship, ecological attention, and forms of remembrance that exceed linear time.
Program

Sky Hopinka, He Who Wears Faces on His Ears (2025, 9 minutes)
Drawing from the Ho-Chunk story of Red Horn, also known as He Who Wears Faces on His Ears, the film moves through Indigenous mythologies and the ways they echo across present-day landscapes. It circles the thresholds between human and spirit realms, attending to the routes that pattern myth, memory, and language.

Fox Maxy, Gathering Dust (2023, 5 minutes)
Commissioned by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Gathering Dust connects water, intergenerational care, and urban development in Los Angeles. Its layered images and soundscape consider lessons exchanged between elders and youth, and the friction and flow between generations.

darylina powderface, how it used to be (2025)
how it used to be is a short experimental film centered on blood memory and the ways memory is carried through land, water, body, story, and movement. Weaving new and archival images with song and layered sound, the film becomes an act of remembrance in which past, present, and future coexist.

Tyson Houseman, opwêyakatâmêw (2024, 10 minutes)
Created from footage gathered near Gregg Lake, Alberta, opwêyakatâmêw features three nêhiyaw brothers walking through the forested territory they explored as children. The film reflects on memory, kinship, unceded land, and the relation between family history and Cree sovereignty.

Sky Hopinka, Here you are before the trees (2020, 13 minutes)
Here you are before the trees is a three-channel work that moves through Indigenous histories in the Hudson River Valley, Wisconsin, and the routes between them. Its three channels are set in the Mahicannituck, the Waazija, and the highways that link these places, reflecting on relocation, memory, and the relation between landscape and history.
Tyson Houseman, Collapsing Wave Function (2025, 6 minutes)
Collapsing Wave Function offers “instructions for time travel.” Created from footage gathered during residencies in Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York, the work reflects on plant consciousness, non-linear depictions of land, and plant dreaming through video feedback loops.

Svetlana Romanova, Hinkelten (2023, 15 minutes)
Formulated in vignettes, Hinkelten, which means “a cold autumn night” in the Eveny language, is woven from renderings of contemporaneity. Following narratives around love in romantic, platonic, intimate, and maternal forms, the film considers how love is visualized and how images participate in that process.

Sky Hopinka, Flesh & Ghost (2025, 14 minutes)
Based on the Hočąk story of the twins Flesh and Ghost, this two-channel work brings together myth, memory, and personal footage from Hopinka’s youth. The story of the separated twins resonates with images of family, childhood, naming, loss, and the persistence of what has passed.

Bios
Sky Hopinka’s work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, and language designs as containers of culture, often expressed through personal, documentary, and non-fiction forms of media. His video, photo, and text work have been exhibited and screened internationally at festivals, museums, and art centers, including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial, the FRONT Triennial, and the 14th Gwangju Biennial. He was a 2022 MacArther Fellow and winner of the 2023 Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel.
For more information, contact [email protected].

Fox Maxy is a Payómkawichum and Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians filmmaker based in San Diego. Her first feature-length film, Gush, premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Her work has screened at TIFF, MoMA, International Film Festival Rotterdam, BlackStar Film Festival, and other venues. She was named Sundance Institute’s Merata Mita Fellow in 2022.

Tyson Houseman is a nêhiyaw video artist, performer, puppeteer, and filmmaker from Paul First Nation and Ermineskin Cree Nation. His practice focuses on nêhiyaw ideologies and teachings, speaking to land-based notions of non-linear time and the relations between humans and their ecologies. His work ranges from single-channel video to immersive installations and live multimedia performance.

darylina powderface is a multidisciplinary artist and storyteller from the Stoney Nakoda and Siksika Nation. Her work spans theater, film, photography, and movement, and investigates spatial and temporal realities through a Nakoda and Blackfoot lens. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University.

Svetlana Romanova (Sakha/Even) is an artist and filmmaker born in Yakutsk, the capital city of the Sakha Republic, Russia, located south of the Arctic Circle. Her practice centers on the importance of Indigenous visual language, particularly in the Arctic regions, and gravitates towards critical self-historization. She received a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design (2012) and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2014). Her films, including Lena River (2014), Manga Bar/Rustam’s Habitat (2019), Kyusyur/Stado (2021), and Season of Dying Water (2015/2022), have been exhibited at venues around the world, including the National Art Museum of the Republic of Sakha, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Flaherty NYC, e-flux Screening Room, Tampere Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, Goethe Institute (Montréal), Artist’s House (Yakutsk), and California Institute of the Arts, among others. She is the recipient of grants, fellowships, residencies, and awards, including “The Right To Be Cold*–Circumpolar Perspectives” Residency in Nunavik and Sápmi, supported by the Goethe Institut (Montréal); and a Jan van Eyck Academie Residency (2022–2023). She was a COUSIN collective Cycle II artist (2022–2023), in support of her work Voyage of Jeanette, a visual essay structured around the Bulunsky district, its residents, and their traditional practices.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to [email protected]. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave, a garage door, leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

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