Filmmaker and visual artist Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) curates a selection of short films by Native North American contemporary artists relating to the themes of An Indigenous Present, including abstraction, transculturalism, and Indigenous creative practice. Runtime: 48 minutes.

“These are fleeting works, grounded in the land and in the ways these artists move through it. Through footsteps and memory, through the sounds of voices both present and past, through family and friendship, their gestures trace a continuity between what has been and what is yet to come. The impressions they leave recall the depressions of paths once walked in another life, now retraced toward another future. Each work is a site of remembrance and becoming—one that acknowledges how the act of moving through a place is also an act of shaping it. Together, these films carve their own marks on the landscape, blurring the boundaries of when and where they belong, and revealing the porous line between presence and absence, between what endures and what drifts away.”

—Sky Hopinka

Program

Fox Maxy, Gathering Dust, 2023

Gathering Dust creates connections between water, intergenerational care, and encroaching urban development. Like the film’s layered visuals, numerous sources converge to create the film’s soundscape.

The film contemplates lessons exchanged between elders and youth, and the differences between generations, friction vs. flow, and the layers underneath Los Angeles.

Fox Maxy is a film director based in San Diego. She is Payómkawichum and Iipay Kumeyaay, from the Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians. Her work explores themes of kinship, emotional well-being, nightlife, fashion, and environmental advocacy—using cinema as a lens to illuminate both intimate and collective experiences of contemporary life.

Tyson Houseman, opwêyakatâmêw, 2024

opwêyakatâmêw is a single-channel video/experimental short created from footage gathered near Gregg Lake, Alberta, Canada. Three nêhiyaw brothers take a walk on their traditional territory and through a forest they explored as children. They find an object eaten and gnawed by a beaver and imbued with animate energy. A voice over of their grandfather offers a teaching in their language, nêhiyawewin.

Tyson Houseman is a nêhiyaw video artist, performer, and filmmaker from Paul First Nation. Tyson’s practice focuses on aspects of nêhiyaw ideologies and teachings—speaking to land-based notions of non-linear time and the interwoven relations between humans and their ecologies.

darylina powderface, how it used to be, 2025

This short experimental film centers on blood memory—how it is carried and ingrained in the land, the water, and the body itself. Through song, story, and movement, darylina awakens the past, present, and future as they coexist, weaving new and archival visuals with layered sound into a living remembrance.

darylina powderface is a multidisciplinary artist and storyteller from the Stoney Nakoda and Siksika Nation. Her work spans theater, film, photography, and movement, offering an influential exploration of indigenous identity and perspective. darylina investigates spatial and temporal realities through a Blackfoot and Nakoda lens, using her art to embody memory, knowledge, and lived experience.

Tyson Houseman, Collapsing Wave Function, 2025

Instructions for time travel. Created from footage gathered at various artist residencies in the northeastern part of North America (Vermont Studio Center, VT; MacDowell, NH; Wassaic Project, NY). Collapsing Wave Function is a reflection on alternative forms of plant consciousness, non-linear depictions of land, and plant dreaming as interpreted through perpetual video feedback loops.

Svetlana Romanova, Hinkelten, 2023

Formulated in vignettes, hinkelten (a cold autumn night in Eveny language) is carefully woven out of renderings of contemporaneity. Following the narratives around the idea of love (romantic, platonic, intimate, and maternal), this film contemplates the forms of its visualization.

Archival footage by Alexander Vasiliev.

Music by MaksNemo.

Svetlana Romanova (Sakha/Even) is an artist and filmmaker born in Yakutsk, the capital city of the Sakha Republic, Russia, located south of the Arctic Circle. Her practice centers on the importance of Indigenous visual language, particularly in the Arctic regions, and gravitates towards critical self-historization.

About the Curator

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington, and spent several years in Palm Springs and Riverside, CA; Portland, OR; and Milwaukee, WI. 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 and non-fictional forms of media.

In the fall of 2022, Hopinka received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work as a visual artist and filmmaker. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Film at Harvard University.

Accessibility

  • Accessible seating is available first-come first-served and may be selected upon theater entry. Please contact our Visitor Services team at visitorservices@icaboston.org or 617-478-3100 for more information.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact our Visitors Services team at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

An Indigenous Present is organized by Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter, guest curators, with Erika Umali, Curator of Collections, and Max Gruber, Curatorial Assistant.

This exhibition is supported in part by Mathieu O. Gaulin, the Leonard and Ruth Horwich Family Foundation, Peggy J. Koenig, Kim Sinatra, the Fotene Demoulas Fund for Curatorial Research and Publications, and an anonymous donor.

With warmest thanks, we gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the ICA’s Avant Guardian Society in making this exhibition possible.