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Sami Hopkins is an artist, writer-researcher, and musician exploring the relationships between subjectivity and its social, material, and symbolic conditions.
Their practice considers how sense is produced and articulated through these relationships, drawing on histories of consciousness, social formation, psychological inquiry and treatment, material experimentation, and speculative thought. Across mediums, they interpret received ideas of madness, magic, belief, agency, 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; ghosts; 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.
Their practice considers how sense is produced and articulated through these relationships, drawing on histories of consciousness, social formation, psychological inquiry and treatment, material experimentation, and speculative thought. Across mediums, they interpret received ideas of madness, magic, belief, agency, 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; ghosts; 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.
Selected
- 2025—Artistic Director, Carolyn Lazard’s Vital and Fiction Contract (films)
- 2024—Yanira Castro, I came here to weep, ISSUE Project Room
- 2023—Christiania Research Residency, Copenhagen, DK
- 2023—Triple Canopy Publication Intensive, New York
- 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
For any inquiries, contact samihpkns+studio@gmail.com.
Hi from the other side of the site; ty for visiting!