PRESS:

BOMB Magazine

Interview

Suneil Sanzgiri by Murtaza Vali

“Sanzgiri’s first institutional solo exhibition, currently at the Brooklyn Museum, focuses on intersections between liberation struggles in Goa and Angola, both former Portuguese colonies, as a way of reflecting on the complexities and legacies of transnational solidarity as a byproduct of colonialism and diaspora.”

 

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

 

e-Flux

Criticism

Phil Coldiron on Suneil Sanzgiri: Here the Earth Grows Gold

“Sanzgiri’s film insists that while learning from the past is necessary, it is not enough: we will have to go on changing our methods if we are to achieve such belief at the scale this world demands.” by Phil Coldiron

 

MOUSSE

Tidbits

Continuously Surviving: Suneil Sanzgiri

“By montaging 3D renderings, screen captures, and YouTube recordings alongside original cinematography, Sanzgiri’s filmmaking expresses an epistemological pluralism, and calls to mind the anarchist principle of diversified tactics, where divergent strategies are embraced in the name of meeting common political goals.” by Harry Burke

Dissent Magazine

Fragments of a New World

“Two Refusals is a geographically sprawling film that mourns lost pasts and unrealized futures. Across two screens, Sanzgiri weaves together archival footage, interviews, and animation, with a script by the Hyderabadi-American poet Sham-e-Ali Nayeem composed largely in the style of epistolary address. The narration begins with the story of Adamastor, a mythological figure who embodies the Cape of Good Hope and the storminess of the seas, first imagined by the Portuguese poet Luís de Camōes in his 1572 Os Lusíadas. The epic chronicles Vasco da Gama’s fifteenth-century journey to India, which was hampered by threats of hostility from people guarding the Mozambique Channel and the treachery of the sea. Adamastor ultimately let the Portuguese pass, leading to centuries of violent colonial rule.” by Nicole-Ann Lobo

 

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

 

Hyperallergic

Reviews

The Lingering Shadow of Portuguese Colonization

“In ‘Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?)’ (2023), the two-channel centerpiece of the exhibition, the words of poet Sham-e-Ali Nayeem and the childhood memories of Shashi Sanzgiri find themselves enmeshed in the life story of Sharada Sawaikar, a Goan liberation fighter whose youth was spent in incarceration. Archival images, songs, and interviews then lead us to the story of the Portuguese revolutionary Sita Valles, who was born to Goan parents. With such invocations, Sanzgiri reminds us that we are all connected in our oppression and our fight against it.” by Bedatri Choudhury

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.”

 

First Post

New York Film Festival 2020: Letter From Your Far-Off Country remixes the history of Indian protest

Letter From Your Far-Off Country, currently playing at the New York Film Festival, boldly draws from different eras of Indian revolution, from the writings of Ambedkar, to fallen Indian communist leaders in the 1980s, to more recent demonstrations, like those at Shaheen Bagh. by Siddhant Adlakha September 28, 2020

 

MUBI Notebook

New York Film Festival 2020: An Eventful Year

Short film highlights from the newly launched Currents section of the New York Film Festival. by Michael Sicinski 23 SEP 2020

 

Platform Mag

Interview with Suneil Sanzgiri

The cinematic space is incredibly diverse and the possibilities that the craft of filmmaking offers are endless. Experimental cinema and genres like short films are garnering more and more attention, especially with the popular rise of film festival culture and OTT platforms, which now provide a streaming space for more independent, low-budget films. As more independent filmmakers venture towards creating astounding cinema, the creative processes and thematic concerns behind the films have become starkly intriguing. During this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, one such short short film caught my attention — At Home But Not At Home by Suneil Sanzgiri.