Please join us for a special event celebrating the release of Sky Hopinka’s Perfidia, co-published by Wendy’s Subway and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, on the occasion of Hopinka’s exhibition, Centers of Somewhere.
Sky Hopinka’s Perfidia moves within the textured landscape of memory, both personal and collective, to address the founding colonial violence of the United States and its lasting impact. In a series of cantos, the book-length poem surfaces a first-person narrative amidst the stream of history and its accounting through the voices of ancestors and kin. Shifting registers between the embodied and the spiritual, Perfidia‘s subjective syntax destabilizes entrenched colonial perspectives and concomitant descriptions of land, sky, sea, myth, place, and personhood.
Perfidia sits at the center of Hopinka’s most recent body of filmic work, which draws from the poem’s sixteen cantos and its previous iterations. These filmic works include the short film Lore (2019), the 2-channel video installation Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer (2019), the feature-length film maɬni (2020), and the photo series The Land Describes Itself (2019).
On Thursday, December 10, Hopinka will be joined in conversation with Perfidia editor, Julie Niemi. To receive the link to the webinar, please register in advance here.
More information on the book here.
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 non fiction forms of media. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and currently teaches at Bard College in Film and Electronic Arts.
Julie Niemi is an independent curator, writer, and editor based in Los Angeles. Through research, design, writing, and exhibition making, her projects grapple with counter histories in the United States. These projects typically look to the built-environment and to landscape as a starting point for inquiry, utilizing scraps of archives and natural resources to tell a longer story of unknown persons, regional places, nameless figures, and collectives. She received an M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, where her thesis was on Tolstoy College, an anarchist educational community active at the University at Buffalo in the 1970s and ‘80s. From 2013–2015, she was co-founder and editor of VIA Publication. She is currently part of the working group Collective Question.
