Sky Hopinka. Fainting Spells
09.18.2025 - 01.18.2026
Sky Hopinka explores Indigenous culture, history, and traditional beliefs through themes of identity, memory, language, and myth. A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and a descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people of Southern California, Hopinka was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington, in the United States. The Pacific Northwest holds a special place in Hopinka’s artwork, especially as he delves into investigating notions of homeland, personhood, and landscape. In particular, his films reflect on the complexities of contemporary Indigenous life by blending non-narrative filmmaking, poetry, and abstract imagery with an ethnopoetic approach—a response against the ethnographic gaze that has long objectified Indigenous cultures in moving image.
Ethnopoetic cinema examines themes of cultural identity, displacement, and the everyday experience through a combination of documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques, thereby emphasizing the artistic and performative aspects of cultural expression. At the core of Hopinka’s work is a profound commitment to storytelling through his Indigenous perspective, a narrative that has long been marginalized within the Western canon. He explains, “Part of the desire I had to make films was to tell Indigenous stories that were unique to my own community and my own identity.”
In Fainting Spells (2018), Hopinka explores the creation story of Xąwįska, or Indian Pipe Plant, also known as ghost flower or corpse plant. This medicinal flowering plant is traditionally used by the Ho-Chunk people to revive those who have fainted and is also emblematic of Indigenous identity, knowledge, and culture. Moreover, its symbolism can be linked to cycles of life and death, or a connection to the spiritual world. Although Hopinka could not unearth a myth for the plant to determine its origins through his extensive research, he instead created one to engage with and reclaim the practice of mythkeepers and mythmaking in his own Indigenous culture.
The three-channel short film begins with a handwritten poem that moves across scenes of expansive colorful landscape accompanied by lyrical music. The poem, which is also listed below, speaks to Xąwįska directly, who later appears personified as a cloaked figure, and leads viewers on a walk through the spirit world in different states of consciousness. Filmed in Washington, Colorado, Wisconsin, Oregon, and New Mexico, Hopinka creates a dreamlike visual narrative by collaging together music, poetry, sound, color, and imagery into a unique immersive experience in this new edition created specifically for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
Poem in Fainting Spells (2018)
Xąwįska, you’ve fainted again.
I plucked a flower from your shoulder blade
and rolled it between my fingers
until it was a light gray mash.
I lit it on fire and blew the smoke onto your face.
As I waited for you to wake I thought of the times your laughter
woke me from a daydream.
What are these blue-greens, oranges and pinks?
The swirling plume of smoke that begs you to rise?
These questions I always meant to ask.
When you finally rose, you blew the smoke out onto your hands
and spoke of my mother.
Xąwįska, you’ve sat outside for too long.
Night is falling and the spirits can see us.
It’s time to go home.
You had told me, “When you see the red oaks follow the water.
Then, when you find a fork in the river
there will be a lovely piece of land.
Remove everything that shines from your hands,
from your neck, from your body,
and swim to the nearest shore.”
Xąwįska, you’ve fainted again.
I tried to revive you, the way that I know.
You never want to rise. You lay there, still.
You taught me to sing the songs of our brothers
so that our relatives will know who we are.
“So loud will be our voices that they’ll reach the sky!”
That is what you told me. That is what I remember.
Xąwįska, you’ve fallen again. I pluck flowers from your shoulder,
your arm, your leg.
I mash them up and set them ablaze.
Xąwįska, you are so quiet.
I am beside you and breathe a breath full of your smoke.
Exhale onto you.
You smolder and ash and collapse.
I am alone again.
I think of that place you once described,
between the fork in the river with the oaks,
as the sky turns red.
I have stayed here up until now.
For a long time I have remained here.
Now, I myself will go wandering around the edge of encircling lake.
Gallery: 103
Curator: Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães
Sky Hopinka
Fainting Spells, 2018
Three-channel color video, with sound, 9 min., 45 sec.
A.P. 1/2, edition of 3
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Council, 2021
© Sky Hopinka
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