Sky Hopinka offers Bone and Light at Tanya Leighton

Sky Hopinka recently opened his solo exhibition Bone and Light at Tanya Leighton in Berlin, his third show with the gallery. Featuring recent photographs, the show pulls you into a world of rolling landscapes, evocative poetic imagery, and the ancient memories embedded in them. The exhibition also features the debut of a new single-channel video He Who Wears Face on His Ears.

Moving images, poetry and photography are combined in Hopinka's practice, where the artist draws upon personal and collective histories to contemplate the different facets of Indigenous identity – the methods through which knowledge is acquired, maintained and then transformed over time. His characteristic blending of visual and textual elements breaks down the barriers between the documentary and the lyrical, transporting viewers into a realm where they can intimately encounter Indigenous perspectives that resist linearity of narrative and expand the scope of seeing and knowing.

In his new video Hopinka grounds the narrative in the Ho-Chunk myth of Red Horn, a savior capable of traversing between the human and the mythic worlds, sent to Earth in human form to combat evil, dying in the process and ultimately revived. The cyclical nature of Red Horn's story is mirrored in Hopinka's own approach to language, myth and cultural memory. Accompanied by a set of photographs shot by the artist at locations featured in his earlier films, and interspersed with calligrams (poems where the words are arranged to evoke images of mythical beings), Hopinka lays out the Ho-Chunk creation myth in its full splendor.

Sky Hopinka is a filmmaker and visual artist of Ho-Chunk and Luiseño origin, whose explorations of Indigenous identities, mythologies and language uncover the indescribable beauty of reality between the crevices of fact and fiction. The exhibition Bone and Light is on view at Tanya Leighton until June 14, 2025. For more about this event visit the gallery site here.