Sky Hopinka: Unforgiven Souls Sing Hymns

The filmmaker and artist Sky Hopinka transports visitors of Broadway gallery, in the concrete sprawl of Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood, to the lush environs of the Pacific Northwest and the indigenous communities who inhabited those lands before the encroachment of America’s genocidal project. Hopinka, who is a member of Ho-Chunk Nation and the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, has established himself as one of experimental documentary’s most exciting practitioners, telling stories of Indigenous art, life, and resistance with a diaristic and impressionistic flair befitting of Jonas Mekas. As his third exhibition at Broadway, Hopinka’s Unforgiven Souls Sing Hymns juxtaposes the artist’s video work with his rarely shown photography, which uses multiple panels of heavily edited landscape imagery to tell stories of travel and displacement across generations.

The centerpiece of Hopinka’s Unforgiven Souls Sing Hymns is Subterranean Moon (2024). Projected across two walls in a secluded back corner of the gallery space, the experimental documentary follows a powwow organized by the filmmaker for his upcoming feature Powwow People. As the gathering unfolds, groups of dancers assemble and perform for the crowd, showcasing a variety of Northern Traditional dance styles and routines. Ruben Little Head, the powwow’s master of ceremonies, serves as the viewer’s guide, emceeing the proceedings with panache, knowledge, and a familiar warmth—best demonstrated by small interjections, such as the acknowledgment of a wedding anniversary or a lost-and-found notice. In what is portrayed as an unplanned moment, Little Head breaks the fourth wall by recognizing the filmmaker for organizing the powwow and asking him to step in front of the crowd; Hopinka, who also served as one of the documentary’s cinematographers, is reticent to put down the camera and opts to keep filming as the attendees cheer for him.

While the primary channel is fixed on the movements of the dancers, Hopinka uses the second projection screen to hyperreal effect. Sometimes, the musicians are shown in juxtaposition to the dancers, and other times, Hopinka blurs the elliptical movements of his subjects until the light and bright colors of the powwow is all a hazy, kaleidoscopic field of color accented by lines of prose from his poetry collection Denizens of Hell. Even with the formal rigor and beauty of these abstract scenes, it is the small, quotidian moments of beauty that shine in Subterranean Moon––where everyday life is an act of resistance.

Sky Hopinka: Unforgiven Souls Sing Hymns is on view through August 2 at Broadway.