Opening Reception: Friday 11 April, 7 PM
Brooklyn-based artist Suneil Sanzgiri’s research-driven practice considers questions of inheritance in relation to histories of anti-colonial struggle. His experimental film and video projects explore image-making, collective memory, and testimony and are often in dialogue with the works of filmmakers, historians, poets, and activists. Beginning with an examination of his father’s family legacy of resistance in Goa, India, to Portuguese occupation (1510–1961), Sanzgiri's recent works contend with the possibilities of transhistorical and cross-continental solidarity.
Commissioned for his solo exhibition, the artist’s new film An Impossible Address (2025) culminates over four years of research around the bonds of mutual struggle for freedom that developed between India and Africa against the Portuguese empire. The work is the final in a series of two films that trace the connections between various liberatory figures in India, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau. Central to the artist’s new film is Sita Valles, an Angolan-born doctor and revolutionary of Goan origin who joined the liberation movement against the Portuguese in Angola and was subsequently disappeared there.
The film is conceived as a letter to Valles that is elaborated, complicated, and in many ways unbounded from words by the staccato of images and sounds that punctuate its reading. Both impossible to compose and to deliver, the letter begins in an acknowledgement of death and moves through it with glimpses of what remains extant—history, memory, inheritance, and other forms of transmission that break the extents of life. Throughout, Valles’s figure guides and haunts Sanzgiri as the film pulls at the threads of history to expose its entanglements with contemporary expressions of empire and the stakes of global anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle today.
Contextualizing Valles’s story within a broader political history, Sanzgiri’s research looks to the formation of national liberation movements, civil society groups, and historic gatherings in order to map the desires and conditions of organized struggle in Asia and Africa following the Second World War. In the gallery, the artist’s film is set within an installation that gestures to the Asia–Africa Conference of 1955—the first significant gathering of states from the two continents held in Bandung, Indonesia. Staged as a show of strength through mutuality, and remembered for its novel endeavour and theatricality, the Bandung Conference is today conserved by the Museum Konperensi Asia Afrika through virtual and life-size dioramas.
Reimagining its elements in the gallery, the artist presents a set of abstracted flags in monochrome that refer to the twenty-nine nations represented at the Bandung Conference. Composed of suspended acoustic felt, these forms are as much a series of stake-less flags as they are an ensemble of quiet figures that hold the room. Articulated between these soft works and set against a crimson backdrop are seven red chairs that invite the viewer to take a seat at the central panel desk from which the conference was led. For Sanzgiri, the recursive image of the conference architecture attends to the unfinished collective work lying dormant in its forms.
Shot on location in Angola, Goa, and Portugal, An Impossible Address is a kaleidoscopic and sonically vibrant journey that combines Sanzgiri’s signature visual language of 16mm film, digital animation, hand-processing, 3D scanning, and archival translations. Through this varied and material exploration, the film wrestles with its own form to test the efficacy of words and images in times of struggle, mourning, suffering, and action.
Suneil Sanzgiri: An Impossible Address is the tenth project developed through Mercer Union’s Artist First commissioning platform and Sanzgiri’s first institutional solo exhibition in Canada.
