This webpage is currently under construction.
Sami Hopkins is an artist, writer-researcher, and musician whose work examines the relationship between subjectivity and its social, material, and symbolic conditions.
Their practice focuses on how sense and meaning are articulated through these relations, drawing from histories of consciousness, social formation, psychological inquiry, material experimentation, and speculative thought. Across mediums, they aim to interpret received ideas of madness, agency, magic, social creativity, and self-organization—often turning to ambivalence as a condition that animates psychic and social life and generates its own aesthetic logic.
Current interests include: Mad studies; sound experimentalism, noise, improvised music; magic (illusion) and deception; contemporary myths, cosmologies, and animisms; logistical nightmares, bureaucratic technologies; critical psychology, depth psychology, theories of distress; philosophies of psychological remediation, cognitive interventions and ableist logics; social contracts, relationships of exchange; uses of poetics.
Sami recently completed a certificate in Labor Studies at CUNY School for Labor and Urban Studies. They have held positions at the Cooper Gallery at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, the Institute for Contemporary Art Boston, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and e-flux. Recent work, projects, and presentations include: Christiania Research Residency (2023), ISSUE Project Room Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship (2021), Recess Critical Writing Fellowship (2020), The Studio Institute’s Museum Education Practicum (2019), and openwork Journal’s editorial team at Columbia University. Sami has received generous support from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, and the Performing Arts Fund Netherlands.
2024 — Carolyn Lazard, Fiction Contract & Vital (films), Artistic Director 2024 — Yanira Castro, I came here to weep, ISSUE Project Room, New York 2023 — Christiania Research Residency, Copenhagen, DK 2023 — Triple Canopy Publication Intensive, New York, NY 2023 — openwork vol. I no. I, Columbia University Libraries 2022 — S. Warren & Sami Hopkins: Place of Toil, ISSUE Project Room 2022 — Aden: Tizita, From the Feet Up, ISSUE Project Room 2022 — Institute for Critical Animal Studies performance lecture 2021 — Leo Genovese: The Art of Not Playing, ISSUE Project Room 2021 — Society for Disability Studies performance lecture 2021 — Jessie Cox: The Sound of Listening, ISSUE Project Room 2021 — ISSUE Project Room Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship 2020 — Recess Critical Writing Fellowship 2020 — “Elliot Reed: On Body & Performance”, Studio Magazine
Full CV available upon request. For any inquiries, contact [email protected].