Sami Hopkins is an artist interested in classificatory and epistemic systems, such as methods in information architecture, computational technology, scientific models of cognition, or psychiatric diagnosis and pathology. Their work examines how these systems establish categories of coherence, how institutions and economies put those categories to use, and how these uses naturalize particular social arrangements and ideas of nature, mind and personhood. Across video, digital rendering, installation, sculpture, and text, they build structures that question the authority of these schemes, responding to their internal limits and contradictions to ask what partial images of the world such orders produce and on what terms they might be reorganized.

Current interests include: Mad studies; 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 previously studied at Berklee College of Music and 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. They have received generous support from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, and the Performing Arts Fund Netherlands.


CV available upon request.
For inquiries, contact samihpkns+studio@gmail.com.

This webpage is always under construction.

















Hi from the other side of the site; ty for visiting!