Elements of representation, attention, time, and text are all part of the work of Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians), and how these are interrelated is investigated in his recent solo show Unforgiven Souls Sing Hymns. Hopinka’s multidisciplinary works are comprised of film, video, photography, and writing. This show included photographic works and a video titled Subterranean Moon (2024). Hopinka’s work refuses to speak to cinema, seeing, and photography on colonial representational terms, established among other means as the result of the confluence of colonialism, positivism, acceleration, and technocracy. Instead, Hopinka produces film and photography different from art that stems from those violent traditions, making work “that affirms Indigenous realities on their own terms.”1

Hopinka’s work is the opposite of spectacular, producing a sort of not-spectacular or antispectacular. Paul Virilio writes, “It was to be in…Los Angeles that the American nation was to pursue, ‘by other...

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