maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore

Sky Hopinka, Diana Flores Ruíz

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.

Diana Flores Ruíz, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, where she teaches courses on race and media in the US. Dr. Ruíz’s research and writing examine how popular media and surveillance technologies coproduce visual infrastructures of racialized violence, as well as the ways in which artist and activist mediations propose alternative forms of safety, survival, and sovereignty. Her essay on Sky Hopinka “Visiting: Towards Ethical Forms of Encounter” will be published in the exhibition catalog The sun comes in whenever it wants at the fall 2022.