The Brooklyn Museum has announced the opening of Suneil Sanzgiri's first solo museum show. In February, Sanzgiri was announced as the winner of the fourth UOVO Prize, an annual award given to an emerging Brooklyn artist to encourage their practice and increase the visibility of their work. Sanzgiri received a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, a fifty-square-foot mural on the facade of UOVO’s facility in Bushwick and a $25,000 unrestricted cash grant.
“I’m tremendously excited to open this exhibition with three brand new works that have been in production for over a year," said Sanzgiri. "The show offers the perfect opportunity to unravel the various threads of my research and consider the complexity of the questions and histories raised by the works, together with audiences at the Brooklyn Museum.”
The exhibition centers on "Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?)," the artist’s newest two-channel video installation. 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. Through documentary interviews and fictional narratives, Sanzgiri sheds light on the entangled relationships among historical figures in Goa, Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau. The piece blends CGI animation, Super 16 mm film and handprocessed and destroyed archival footage and cinematic film clips together.
"Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?)" (2023) focuses on Portugal’s oldest work of epic poetry, "Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads)." In the film, a woman’s dreams become haunted by the mythological titan from the Lusiads called the Adamastor, a giant storm cloud that forms on the Cape of Good Hope and seeks to destroy Vasco da Gama’s ship, to prevent the explorer from reaching India. The film simultaneously reframes the Adamastor as a figure of anti-colonial revolt and confronts its ultimate failure.
Alongside the films, is a 16 mm film projection of a red banner reading “YOUR HISTORY GETS IN THE WAY OF MY MEMORY,” blowing across an ocean landscape. The line is borrowed from Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali’s 1997 poem “Farewell.” A version of Sanzgiri’s CGI-animated work, is displayed as a mural on the UOVO Brooklyn building.
"Suneil Sanzgiri: Here the Earth Grows Gold" is on view in the Brooklyn Museum’s Ingrassia Gallery of Contemporary Art from Oct. 27, 2023-May 5, 2024. "My Memory Is Again in the Way of Your History (After Agha Shahid Ali)," is on view at UOVO’s Brooklyn facility until July 2024.
