Tiergarten, Berlin
Sky Hopinka
Bone & Light
Tanya LeightonTanya Leighton is pleased to present Bone & Light, the third solo exhibition by Sky Hopinka with the gallery and his second in Berlin. The exhibition debuts a new single-channel video alongside a series of recent photographs—works that deepen Hopinka’s evocative engagement with language, landscape, and memory. Spanning moving image, photography, and poetry, Hopinka’s practice navigates the layered poetics of place and perception. Drawing from personal and collective histories, his work reflects a sustained exploration of Indigenous identity—of how knowledge is held, remembered, and transformed over time. Blurring the boundaries between the documentary and the lyrical, Hopinka creates works that offer an embodied, often intimate encounter with Indigenous perspectives. His visual and textual compositions examine the complexities of survivance, displacement, and return, crafting immersive experiences that resist linear narratives and invite expanded ways of seeing and knowing. Sky Hopinka (b. 1984 in Ferndale, Washington) lives and works in New York. He is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation/ Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. In 2022, he received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work in film and video that offer new strategies of representation for the expression of Native worldviews. In 2023, he received the Baloise Art Prize for his participation in Art Basel Statements in Basel, Switzerland. Recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Friart, Fribourg; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Museu de Arte de São Paulo; Speed Art Museum, Louisville; LUMA, Arles; San José Museum of Art; Broadway Gallery, New York; Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Block Museum of Art, Chicago; Vorspiel/transmediale, Berlin; VOX Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal; Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; Tate Modern, London; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, and CCS Bard (curated by Lauren Cornell) at the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, just to name a few. His work is included in the permanent collections of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; MUDAM, Luxembourg; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kadist, San Francisco; Milwaukee Art Museum; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Northwestern Mutual, Milwaukee; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton; and Princeton University Art Museum, amongst others. Hopinka’s work is currently on view at the 16th Sharja Biennial; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Berkeley; the Zimmerli Art Museum, New Jersey; the Hudson River Museum, New York, and at Nottingham Contemporary in England.