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.