Sky Hopinka wins top prize at Art Basel
Sky Hopinka has been named one of two winners of the 2023 Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel. Given annually to emerging artists featured in the fair’s Statements sector, Hopinka and fellow honoree Sin Wai Kin will each receive $33,000 (30,000 Swiss francs), the largest prize affiliated with the fair’s Swiss edition. Additionally, the Baloise insurance company will purchase works by both artists and gift them to the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt and to MUDAM in Luxembourg.
The Ferndale, Washington–born Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people, won for his four-channel film Just a Soul Responding, which is being presented at Art Basel by New York’s Broadway gallery. The film, which layers texts about colonization and Indigenous pasts atop landscape montages explores trauma and loss, and is representative of Hopinka’s oeuvre, in which he typically investigates the meanings of homeland and landscape and their relation to language and culture.