Sky Hopinka's new book Perfidia moves within the textured landscape of memory, both personal and collective, to address the founding colonial violence of the united states and its lasting impact. In a series of cantos, the book-length poem surfaces a first-person narrative amidst the stream of history and its accounting through the voices of ancestors and kin. Shifting registers between the embodied and the spiritual, Perfidia's subjective syntax destabilizes entrenched colonial perspectives and concomitant descriptions of land, sky, sea, myth, place, and personhood.

Perfidia sits at the center of Hopinka's most recent body of filmic work, which draws from the poem's sixteen cantos and its previous iterations. these filmic works include the short film Lore (2019), the 2-channel video installation Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer (2019), the feature-length film Maɬni - Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore (2020), and the photo series the Land Describes Itself (2019).

An excerpt from the book is published here alongside photographs from HOPINKA’S series Breathings (2020) and The Land Describes Itself (2019), and a conversation between Hopinka and editor Julie Niemi.  

This program is organized with Wendy’s Subway, a nonprofit arts and literary organization in brooklyn, ny, which co-published Perfidia with the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in October 2020, on the occasion of Hopinka's solo exhibition Centers of Somewhere at the CCS Bard Galleries, on view through February 14, 2021.