New Artist Focus: Minh Nguyen on Suneil Sanzgiri

On a wooden shelving unit, a diverse collection of items is showcased, comprising family photographs, postcards, and various objects such as a small gold trophy. The image undergoes digital manipulation, where sections have been selectively blacked out with a painterly effect.
Golden Jubilee - Suneil Sanzgiri, 2021.

Listen to the audio version of this essay on Soundcloud. (Listening time: 11 minutes)

 

A prose poem premised as a letter, written by Kashmiri American Muslim poet Agha Shahid Ali in 1996, expresses the desperate conditions in India-occupied Kashmir. “Dear Shahid,” the narrator addresses an unknown character, “I am writing to you from your far-off country, far even from those of us who live here, where you no longer are.” He describes life on the ground: “Men are forced to stand barefoot in snow waters all night… soldiers smash radios and televisions. With bare hands they tear our houses to pieces.” The narrator says he had gone to the post office earlier and found another letter addressed to Shahid among hundreds of bags of undelivered mail. “So I am enclosing it. I hope it’s from someone you are longing for news of.” Suneil Sanzgiri’s film ‘Letter From Your Far-Off Country’ (2020) draws from this poem as a metaphor for diasporic experience. The epistolary format is one marked by absence and distance; the writer pens missives to a loved one as a substitute for (but what can never adequately replace) being together. The lost correspondences in Ali’s poems image the continual corrosion in successive migrant generations, as “home” becomes more abstract and unreachable. 

 

A man is seated on the ground in a forest at the base of a tree, wearing glasses and a suit. The forest is in darkness but the man is illuminated by artificial light. The photograph is taken on analogue film, and the sprockets on one side are visible.
Letter from your far off country – Suneil Sanzgiri, 2020.

 

‘Letter’ is part of Sanzgiri’s Barobar Jagtana trilogy, along with ‘At Home But Not At Home’ (2019) and ‘Golden Jubilee’ (2021), a suite of short essay films in which the artist pieces together a biographical and political lineage, while reflexively displaying its messy, frenetic process. A wide range of subjects and source materials––the surveillance technology of mining companies in Goa, Indian resistance against Portuguese colonisation, the 1950s movement Parallel Cinema––play alongside drone videography, 3D renderings, Gmail browsers, search bars and text messages. “These digital modes for communication”, as Isabel Ling writes on Sanzgiri’s films, “are not unfamiliar to those who come from diasporic households, where grainy video calls across time zones and WhatsApp messages form the infrastructure for familial connection”. And like the epistolary, the video essay is a genre that attracts thinking on migration and deracination; one can understand Sanzgiri’s films as descendants of this tradition, of ’80s and ’90s works by Walid Raad, Trinh T Minh-ha, the Black Audio Film Collective and John Akomfrah,whose signature oceanic imagery feel kindred to the roiling digital waves in Sanzgiri’s ‘Golden Jubilee’. The diaristic braiding of the familial and grand-historical recalls Rea Tajiri’s ‘History and Memory’ (1991), which takes as departure point a photograph the artist found in a national archive of her grandmother in an internment camp. In ‘Letter’, Sanzgiri likewise begins a meditation on the notion of inheritance through a story of Prabhakar Sanzgiri (a distant relative who was a Communist trade-union activist and biographer of the political leader and anti-caste activist B.R. Ambedkar). ‘At Home But Not at Home’ opens with an eponymous conversation between Stuart Hall and Les Back, calling to mind the Black video artists at the turn of the millennium (Isaac Julien, Sankofa Collective, Dana Inkster), whose works vividly interpret Hall’s writings on culture and postcolonialism. What the concept may help us do, Hall writes in his essay “When Was ‘The Post-colonial’?: Thinking at the Limit” (1995), is “characterize the shift in global relations”, help us identify what “relations and dispositions of power are emerging in the new conjecture”. This could very well describe the best effects that diaspora art can have today. 

 

An colourful abstract vector landscape with grid overlays is in the background. Collaged on top of it are an inverted image of waves and an image of an older man gazing into the camera which looks like a screenshot from a video call.
At home but not at home – Suneil Sanzgiri, 2019.

 

Like the iPhone 8 interface in ‘At Home But Not At Home’, the hazard of working with new media technologies is that it gets outdated fast. The same can be said for “diaspora discourse”, a derisive term lobbed against indulgent hand-wringing about placelessness through trite, self-exotifying tropes (e.g. “mango poems.”) People find such expressions tiresome because they languish in individualised yearning, seldom transforming into substantive race, class, or geopolitical analysis. What I appreciate about Sanzgiri’s films are the moments when they elegantly move outside one’s own head or screen. In ‘Letter’, a sequence where Ali’s poem is overlaid in text over 16mm footage of India transitions to a YouTube clip where the same poem is read in a demonstration against the Indian government’s atrocities in Kashmir at Jamia Millia Islamia University. In another scene, the actress Shabana Azmi comes onstage at an award ceremony and speaks out about the murder of playwright and Communist Party of India member Safdar Hashmi by the Congress’s supporting candidates. “We filmmakers and film lovers wish to register our protest against the system that on the one hand claims to promote creativity, and on the other, connives in the murder of cultural activists”, Azmi declares to a booing crowd. Sanzgiri mirrored this act in his own statement regarding the withdrawal of his participation at this year’s Berlinale, to protest Germany’s suppression of criticisms of Israel’s assaults on Gaza: “We as artists must stand up to structures of silence, suppression, censorship, and ‘artwashing’ of a genocide.” It is one among Sanzgiri’s recent activities (including participating in a protest at Brooklyn Museum while his exhibition was on view inside) in which he demonstrated the artist’s agency to resist institutional co-optation, to apply the principles inherent in one’s artworks to action.

 

Last November I had the chance to visit the site of the 1955 Bandung Conference, a recurring reference in Sanzgiri’s work and for many, a charged symbol of Third Worldist solidarity. (Occurring during the beginning of the Cold War, twenty nine members of nations from Africa and Asia convened to denounce colonialism and form what would later become the Non-Aligned Movement.) At the entrance of the site, which has been preserved as the Museum of the Asian African Conference, you are greeted by a wax rendition of the diplomatic meeting, where kitschy sanguine figurines encircle a table surrounded by a colourful array of flags. The exhibition’s wall texts tell a simple tale of cooperation. Sanzgiri’s approach is the opposite of smooth narratives enshrined in wax. It is, rather, jagged, incoherent: in the unease in Suneil’s face where he appears on a Zoom call with his father, the corrosion of expired film stock, the lo-res renders, the glitches that tear across the screen. In an essay that accompanies his Brooklyn Museum exhibition ‘Here the Earth Grows Gold’, Sanzgiri urges a remembrance of the “spirit of Bandung in the wake of the twentieth century’s whiplashing contradictions” that interrogates the very premise of statecraft. “What if the nation-state was corrupt from its inception?” 

 

It is this restless, unsettled energy in Sanzgiri’s work and life that I find particularly poignant for thinking about diaspora––as a condition and potential political orientation. Cringe notwithstanding, diaspora is a great and distinct pain, some of us know, that’s undeniable. Migration and exile wipe away worlds of knowledge and relation that no state-of-the-art imaging technology can ever contrive. Yet may we move past this pain as wallowing sadness, but toward anger (perhaps Aimé Césaire’s “a cosmic anger, a creative anger”) as a catalysing force. And from an uprooted position may we forge new orientations––ones that aren’t bleary-eyed about sectarian pasts, but rooted in internationalist struggle against imperialism and authoritarianism in their various present forms. I think back to Hall’s phrase “at home and not at home”. In finding home nowhere, may we find it everywhere.

 


 

Minh Nguyen is a writer and organizer of exhibitions and programs living in New York. She is a recipient of a 2022 Andy Warhol Arts Writers grant and a current visiting scholar at New York University’s A/P/A Institute.

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