In Dreams and Autumn / Endless Dreams
films by Sky Hopinka and Renée Green
The exhibition brings together two multi-channel films: Sky Hopinka’s In Dreams and Autumn (2021) and Renée Green’s Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009). In their experimental films, the two artists create dense poetic collages of words and images that reveal dreams and cultural memories linked to the notion of homeland. The issues of migration, dislocation and cultural exchange are critical to both artists. They speak of transit and how relationships between and to communities shape our understanding of our place in the world.
Renée Green’s work engages with circuits of relation and exchange over time. In Endless Dreams and Water Between, she examines how desires and dreams are carried across the ocean and how islands have shaped literature, history, and the imagination. The film narrates the correspondence among four fictitious characters who live on different islands. Through their exchange of thoughts, dreams, and memories, they convey the uncertainties and desires, and the bond that each has with her own island.
Hopinka’s films, photographs, and poetry explore the layered nature of contemporary Indigenous perspectives, memory, and culture. In Dreams and Autumn is, in Hopinka’s words, “A letter to a sibling, reflecting on our pasts and ourselves, and the parents and grandparents we knew and could never know… the voices and the texts overlap and are distant, where a return to the road is a return to solitude as the memories of our grandmothers shape a present loneliness and a gathering of futures.”
Image, above: Still from Renée Green’s Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009)
Artists
The Indigenous filmmaker, video artist, poet, and MacArthur Foundation grantee Sky Hopinka was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington. He is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and a descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. Hopinka’s work has been shown in major exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial and the Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His films have been screened at various film festivals, including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, Punto de Vista, and the New York Film Festival. Hopinka was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018-2019, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, a recipient of a 2020 Alpert Award for Film/Video, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and was a 2021 Forge Project Fellow. Hopinka is an Assistant Professor of Film at Bard College in New York.
Renée Green art installations, videos and films have been seen in museums, biennales, and festivals throughout the world. A retrospective of her work was organized in by KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin in 2021. Another extensive survey was organized by the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland in 2009. Green has had solo museum exhibitions in the U.S., Canada, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland and the U.S., including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In addition, her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Hammer Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; ICA, Philadelphia; ICA, Boston; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville; Museum der Moderner, Salzburg , and many others.
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