Suneil Sanzgiri & Tiffany Sia
in conversation at PIONEER WORKS (2021)

Presented by Asia Art Archive in America and Pioneer Works.

Assembled for the first time in New York, Suneil Sanzgiri’s recent body of work (2019 – 2021) explores the richness and density of questions surrounding identity, memory, diaspora, and decolonization in South Asia. Blending 16mm film, desktop aesthetics, 3D renderings, and direct animation, Sanzgiri’s films utilize an aesthetics of distance and proximity to gesture to tensions, possibilities, and replications of what we find when we search for ourselves in the remnants of colonial histories.

Spanning events and figures like the liberation of Goa in 1961, the 1955 Bandung Conference, the caste abolitionist B.R. Ambedkar, the poet Agha Shahid Ali, and the continued occupation of Kashmir, “Borobar Jagtana” takes its title from a line in Golden Jubilee (2021) loosely translated to “continuously living, surviving” in Sanzgiri’s father’s native language of Konkani. Sanzgiri was joined by artist, filmmaker and writer Tiffany Sia for a post-screening Q&A.

Doc Talk Fall 2022: Barobar Jagtana by Suneil Sanzgiri

Moderated by Lana Lin, Director of the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies. Co-produced with Documentary Program Associates Cacau Araujo (Doc Studies '22 & Media Studies '23) and Tiffany Jiang (Doc Studies '22 & Media Studies '23).

Contact Conversation: Suneil Sanzgiri and Renée Green in conversation (2022)

Screening and conversation as part of artist and Professor Renée Green’s exhibition Contact at moCa Cleveland, in partnership with FRONT International and CWRU Film Society.

IFFR afterthoughts:
Jemma Desai & Suneil Sanzgiri in conversation (2021)

Jemma Desai and Suneil Sanzgiri in conversation about “Letter From Your Far-Off Country.” In a search for solidarity in sounds and colours, Sanzgiri traces lines of ancestral memory, poetry and history from his birth.

The Brooklyn Rail: New Social Environments
Tausif Noor & Suneil Sanzgiri in Conversation (2023)

Artist Suneil Sanzgiri joins Rail contributor Tausif Noor on Friday (1/19) for a conversation on the occasion of Here the Earth Grows Gold at the Brooklyn Museum.

Sanzgiri discusses using imaging technologies to meditate on what it means to witness from afar, exploring the complexities of anti-colonialism, nationalism, and diasporic identity, and being inspired by his family’s legacy of resistance in Goa, India, an area under Portuguese occupation for over 450 years until its independence in 1961.

Chen's is pleased to announce a screening and discussion with filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri. The conversation will focus on the relationship between diasporic agency and filmmaking as an unenclosed practice of solidarity and revolt. The program will include Sanzgiri’s film ‘At Home But Not At Home’ (2019), featuring interviews with his father growing up under Portugese colonialism in India, utilizes modes of seeing at a distance to question the construction of memory, identity, and anti-colonial solidarity across continents. It will be followed by a trailer for his upcoming 'Letter From Your Far-off Country'. www.chens.world

ESSAYS

“On World-Making amid Contradiction and Crisis”
on Brooklyn Museum’s website

(originally published as “Contradiction and Crisis: Fractured World-making Across Abyssal Lines, or Becoming Insoverign”

“What began as an attempt to find traces of connection between Africans and Indians, rooted in my father’s childhood observations of African soldiers in Portuguese uniforms reluctantly stationed in Goa, continues to inform my search for these histories. Acknowledging that no history, no narrative, is ever complete, possibilities are glimpsed and grasped, continuously, simultaneously, through the past and the present combined.

We must propel ourselves into these complexities and paradoxes—for what else is solidarity but an intricate mess of possibility? Perhaps, even if under threat of annihilation, it is the insovereign who can show us the way, with the strength of their desire to build worlds and break down others, a desire so strong that no regime may claim it as their own. This is the world of the insovereign, a world still yet for us to build.”

“Un-Meshing the World”
on Non-Fiction Journal, published by Open City Documentary Fest

“Somewhere between reclamation and repair, photogrammetry offered a conflicted and contradictory vision forwards through a shared relationship between my father, myself, and his memories of our ancestral house and toward a sense of home and belonging despite (or perhaps in the face of) neo-colonial theft, destruction, and exhaustion. This vision was inherently incomplete and did not seek to find totality, nor its telos structured by a definitive whole. By working with—not against—photogrammetry’s limits, glitches, and blemishes (their artifacts as we say) we are able to touch on an approximation of a dark infinite—a reversal of this same tool’s use value as an instrument for hyper-accuracy—floating in a sublime nothingness only to reflect our faces back at us from the glare of the LCD retina screen. The lacunae of the image is perhaps our best chance to escape our already hyper-meshed world.”

“Diaspora at a Distance”
on Pioneer Works’s Broadcast

“Diaspora is oceanic in its thinking, and state-based consolidation of identity is an arid landscape in ruins."

Artist, filmmaker, and former PW resident alum Suneil Sanzgiri meditates on rising Hindu nationalism and protest movements across India’s diaspora, and the intrinsic relationships between exile, ghosts, and cinema.

PRESS:

The Brooklyn Rail

ArtSeen

Suneil Sanzgiri: Here the Earth Grows Gold

“Through sculpture and film, Brooklyn-based artist, researcher, and filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri’s first solo museum show explores histories of struggle and belonging, of identities formed between continents and unconfined by nation states. The UOVO Prize winner’s exhibition, Here the Earth Grows Gold, is comprised of three new works that posit history as fluid and in a constant state of (re)formation. Poetry emerges as a form of truth or a means of accessing memories that challenges the hegemony of official historical narratives.” by Dina. A. Ramadan

Metrograph Journal

Interview: Suneil Sanzgiri

“Images of Goa, the birthplace of Sanzgiri’s father and a Portuguese colony until 1961, lead us into those of Angola and Mozambique; the memories of a relative, a card-carrying member of India’s Communist party, thread through scenes from Muslim women’s demonstrations and anti-caste activism in India; and the writings of Stuart Hall, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Yashica Dutt, and more weave together in a rich, intellectual web, brought to life by Sanzgiri’s free-form digital trickery and audiovisual juxtapositions. As if in protest of a world riven by borders and their violence, these films give shape to a thrillingly borderless heterotopia, where disparate forces can join to dream up something new—call it solidarity.” by Devika Girish

Document Journal

‘Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?)’ excavates cultural memory

“Encountering the artist’s experimental techniques feels like parsing through a dense postmodern text. Sanzgiri is investigating memory, and the film unfolds like a half-forgotten story, trying to remember itself.” by Maximilian Tapogna

MIT Technology Review

The art of unearthing history

“An alumnus of the Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) program, Sanzgiri uses a unique approach combining such things as analysis of historical texts and 3D scanning to explore geopolitics and economic inequality.  He also manipulates physical materials such as 16-millimeter film to create art that reveals truths about the past.” by Joshua Sariñana

Surface Mag

Suneil Sanzgiri’s Anti-Colonialism Films Get a Bigger Screen

“The Indian-American artist, who became the first filmmaker to win the UOVO Prize, talks about adapting his first feature-length film for the Brooklyn Museum, bringing films into the physical dimension, and his long-awaited return to practicing sculpture.” by Jenna Adrian-Diaz

C Magazine

Golden Jubilee: An interview with Suneil Sanzgiri

“Suneil Sanzgiri’s Golden Jubilee (2021) is an abstract study of anti-colonial liberation struggles in Goa, India. It offers a sonic and visual journey through family history, local mythology, and the extractive legacy of the region. In the artist’s distinct aesthetic mode, the fragment is one articulation of the stakes in diasporic filmmaking—a storying with rather than against incoherence and incongruity that allows us to question how we might conjure (and possibly recoup) histories without futures, with a generosity of mind and spirit.” by Aamna Muzaffar

The Art Newspaper

Film-maker Suneil Sanzgiri wins UOVO Prize, and will have a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum

“The film-maker Suneil Sanzgiri, who in recent years has gained recognition for a trilogy of films that entwines histories and legacies of colonialism and migrations across the Global South, is the winner of the fourth annual UOVO Prize presented by the Brooklyn Museum.” by Claire Voon

SEEN Journal

Suneil Sanzgiri Keeps Time

“Often, the diasporic experience can feel like a race to construct a body of proof—an accumulation of evidence for one’s personal validity across borders in the bid for belonging. In contrast, Sanzgiri’s films loiter in the unknown, employing a speculative approach to storytelling that gives permission to shape the diasporic narrative from the void.” by Isabel Ling

Art in America

Suneil Sanzgiri looks back on India’s Anti-Colonial Histories

“What makes Sanzgiri such a bracingly relevant artist is not only his aesthetic and ethical rigor, but his ability to reclaim histories once stolen by imperialism and now menaced by ethnic and religious sectarianism. “What is liberation when so much has already been taken?” asks a disembodied voice in Golden Jubilee. Through his films, Sanzgiri doesn’t attempt to resolve such questions, but urges us to ask them seriously, persistently, and with nuance.” by Tausif Noor

ASAP Art

History’s Promise: On Suneil Sanzgiri’s At Home But Not At Home

“Sanzgiri unearths images that describe the slender threads tying potential locations of resistance across the Indian Ocean. His efforts provide a way to counter the colonial employment of disparate populations in military adventures to maintain their regimes of power and control.” by Ankan Kazi

Film Quarterly

On Virtuality and the Diasporic Imagination: The Tenth Annual BlackStar Film Festival

“Letter offers an unusual approach to the theme of diaspora, which typically gets a lot of screen time at BlackStar, more often in “struggle for the American dream” approaches. On the level of craft and aesthetics, there is almost too much to write about Letter, as its digital reconstructions of landscapes and urban spaces are a compelling way to move the viewer through faraway space, while the picture-in-picture collages of B. R. Ambedkar (“Babasaheb”) are breathtaking. Letter from Your Far-Off Country is well deserving of its award for Best Experimental Film. “ by Larissa Andrea Johnson

fotomuseum winterthur

Black Aesthetic Strategy: Images that Move: DISLOCATION/RELOCATION

“Suneil Sanzgiri invites us to think about locatedness and visibility in his short film Letter From Your Far-Off Country (2020). A meditation on diaspora, history, ruin and anti-caste protest in India, the film gathers together a multiplicity of voices.” [..] “Letter From Your Far-Off Country is not an education, it doesn’t serve as an explanation to a certain set of events or histories. Rather it states its position from a passionate and empathetic point of view, often told through cultural practice.” by Rhea Storr

Ultradogme

Diaspora and Disappearance: ‘Letter From Your Far-Off Country’ and ‘Maat Means Land’

“A multimedia investigation into individuals, places, and struggles that make up Sanzgiri’s attempt to delve into and constitute his family history and its wider implications. […] Sanzgiri’s formal choices echo this intellectual sense of time-traveling trauma and trans-generational bonds, in that he interweaves and layers both superannuated and latter-day forms. [..] Sanzgiri’s film then is not only wise in how creative and amorphous task it is to piece together one’s own family tree and national heritage, and therefore one’s own identity, but the dizzying fluctuations in meaning that take place depending on the form and format into which these tides and individuals of history are fitted.” by Ruairí McCann

Woche der Kritik

Film Text: Letter From Your Far-Off Country

“This film is a part of a lost, mythical, ‘national integration project,’ where strange interstices could only perhaps meet as myths: assassinated communists, a mass protest of Muslim women, an anti-caste rational god, a Kashmiri poet, a people under siege. Seventeen minutes, it feels like a precursor, a beginning of the endless segues and stories of people, who stand apart.” by Ekta Mittal

Cinestaan

Letter From Your Far-off Country review: Compelling, poignant visual collage of history, memory and understanding

“The film opens with the words, 'From one's birth a wellspring of worlds', and ends with the striking statement, 'How we connect, how we comprehend is up to us.' It’s a necessary reminder to us to question and seek out more from the world around us rather than just observe and be silent.”

The Juggernaut

The Best South Asian Films of 2020: In a year without theaters, films from the subcontinent and its diaspora still thrived

Ranked #3 in the Best South Asian Films of 2020, Siddhant Adlakha writes of Letter From Your Far-off Country, “A haunting, boundary-pushing experimental work, Suneil Sanzgiri examines the relationship between the past and present of India’s protest movements via the dynamic between physical and digital images.”