Installations
Brooklyn Museum
Suneil Sanzgiri: Here the Earth Grows Gold
Oct. 27, 2023 - May 5, 2024
How do we live through and narrate moments of revolution and revolt, and how do we understand these experiences across time and distance? Using imaging technologies to meditate on what it means to witness from afar, Suneil Sanzgiri explores the complexities of anti-colonialism, nationalism, and diasporic identity. His work is 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. Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?), the artist’s newest two-channel video installation, combines archival footage, animation, interviews, and a script written by poet Sham-e-Ali Nayeem. The film tells the stories of the mutual struggle in India and Africa against Portuguese colonialism, highlighting the solidarity that developed between the two continents during the 1960s and 1970s.
Here the Earth Grows Gold, Sanzgiri’s first solo museum exhibition, pairs the film with a 16 mm projection and new sculptural work. Modeled on bamboo structures seen across South Asia, the assemblage features family photos, 3D renderings, anti-colonial publications, and images of water and red clay soil from Goa that are drawn from his research. Together these works present the concept of diaspora as a way to reconfigure our understanding of history and belonging.
Mass MoCA
Barobar Jagtana Trilogy (single-channel, mixed media installation, archival ephemera), 2023
Included in the exhibition to see oneself at a distance curated by Meghan Claire Considine
For to see oneself at a distance, Suneil Sanzgiri’s trilogy of short films are presented in a new sculptural installation that proposes a kaleidoscopic vision of national liberation and solidarity in South Asia. In this body of work, Sanzgiri presents archival imagery alongside contemporary footage and animations to illuminate ongoing and overlapping histories of collectivity and dissent.
Pioneer Works
Golden Jubilee (three-channel), 2021
“Golden Jubilee”, presented at Pioneer Works in November 2021 in conjunction with Asia Art Archive in America to accompany the first public screening of Sanzgiri’s “Barobar Jagtana” triology was re-organized as a three-channel video and sculptural installation. combining 3D printed artifacts pulled from photogrammetry scans of Sanzgiri’s family’s ancestral house in Goa, India, alongside ceramic cast fragments of objects from the house. This new iteration of Sanzgiri’s third and final film in the triology speaks to the abstraction and distance of the fragmented nature of longing and belonging, home, hybridity and the way technology changes our understanding what it means to belong to a diaspora.
Continuing with his meditations on travel, history, and memory this re-worked three-channel version of Golden Jubilee pulls from screen recordings of the making of the film with Sanzgiri’s collab- orator Sumedh Sawant, new diaristic writings and explorations of unused footage from previous films and extended original music from Golden Jubilee’s sountrack.
Everson Museum of Art
Light Work’s Urban Video Project
Golden Jubilee, installation view
Included in the series “The Pourous Body of the Earth” addressing concerns of extraction and colonial forms of environmental racism, Golden Jubilee was projected on the facade of the Everson Museum of Art’s historic building designed by architect I.M. Pei. “Golden Jubilee” played every evening on loop in Syracuse, NY from September 1 - October 22nd, 2022 starting at dusk and ending at 11:00 pm.
moCa Cleveland
Golden Jubilee (single-channel), 2022
Included as a part of Renée Green’s solo exhibition “Contact” at MoCA Cleveland in conjunction with FRONT Triennial, “Golden Jubilee” was projected on a slanted piece of drywall, occupying a corner of the museum rarely utilized. The image’s proximity to the floor creates a new dynamic for the film, allowing scenes to be literally and figuratively grounded, with certain subjects’ likenesses appearing to reach into the museum’s floor itself.
Along with this single-channel installation, Sanzgiri worked with Green to co-program a film series with MoCA Cleveland in Fall of 2022.
Sunaparanta Center for the Arts, Goa
Golden Jubilee (single-channel), 2023
included in the group exhibition “Growing Like a Tree: Sent a Letter”
Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts and Ishara Art Foundation join hands in a pioneering initiative that advances new and cutting-edge art practices from South Asia and beyond. This show reflects the complex and imbricated histories of South Asia and the world. The curation pushes the boundaries of contemporary image-making as modes of address that offer a changing map of interconnected practices.