Suneil Sanzgiri: An Impossible Address
Brooklyn-based artist Suneil Sanzgiri鈥檚 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鈥檚 family legacy of resistance in Goa, India, to Portuguese occupation (1510鈥�1961), Sanzgiri's recent works contend with the possibilities of transhistorical and cross-continental solidarity.
Commissioned for his solo exhibition, the artist鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥攈istory, memory, inheritance, and other forms of transmission that break the extents of life. Throughout, Valles鈥檚 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.
Recommended for you
Brooklyn-based artist Suneil Sanzgiri鈥檚 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鈥檚 family legacy of resistance in Goa, India, to Portuguese occupation (1510鈥�1961), Sanzgiri's recent works contend with the possibilities of transhistorical and cross-continental solidarity.
Commissioned for his solo exhibition, the artist鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥攈istory, memory, inheritance, and other forms of transmission that break the extents of life. Throughout, Valles鈥檚 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.
Artists on show
Related articles
Marking the artist鈥檚 first institutional solo exhibition in Canada, the exhibition features a new film by the same name: 鈥淎n Impossible Address鈥�, the 10th project developed through Mercer Union鈥檚 trailblazing Artist First commissioning platform.
What's on nearby
