The Brooklyn Rail

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.

My Memory is Again in the Way of Your History (After Agha Shahid Ali) (2023) borrows its title from a refrain in “Farewell,” a 1997 poem by the Kashmiri American poet. The one-minute looped film shows a digitally rendered, bright red banner dancing on the open waves, aimless but steady. The grainy quality of the 16mm film adds an air of wistful nostalgia; the banner signals an endless search in a boundless sea, the struggle between memory and history, between the colonizer and the colonized. (A version of the piece, a fifty-square-foot mural, is also on display on the façade of the UOVO storage facility in Bushwick.)

In Red Clay, Stretched Water (Return to the Source) (2023) Sanzgiri erects a shrine to a forgotten past from black-stained bamboo stalks tied together with acrylic rope. Referencing the informal huts constructed for various uses throughout South Asia, the frame of the mixed-media sculpture sits in a large pool of water and houses a personal and political archive which situates both Goa and Sanzgiri’s family history within a larger anti-colonial struggle. This archive includes a photograph of the artist’s grandfather, the cover of the 1957–58 proceedings of the inaugural Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference in Cairo, photographs of African anti-colonial leaders, screenshots of family photographs sent via text message, a 1993 YouTube video of Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmad, stretched photographs of Goan red clay soil, and water from the Arabian Sea. Printed on plexiglass, the images have a haunting, ephemeral quality, as if briefly capturing ghosts from a disappearing history. A 3D rendering of a statue of Saint Francis Xavier, chief proponent of the 1561 Goa imposition—during which the practice of Islam and Hinduism as well as the use of Indigenous languages such as Konkani and Sanskrit were criminalized—lies face down in the water, defeated and discarded. A stanza from “We Are the World Wanderers” (1971), by the Konkani poet Manohar Rai Sardesai, frames the sculpture on the surrounding gallery walls: “We have carried on our shoulders / And in our flesh the thorn of thought / And the unseen broken thread. The weight of exile / Against this ceaseless wandering/ That runs through our history.” Red Clay, Stretched Water is an homage to those who have preserved memory during and despite disorientating exilic wanderings.

Goa was invaded by Portugal in 1510 and occupied for 450 years. A few months after the first Conference of Nationalist Organizations of the Portuguese Colonies (CONCP) in Casablanca, Morocco, and following pressure from leaders of the liberation movements in these countries, the Indian Armed Forces liberated Goa in December 1961. In his two-channel video installation, Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?) (2023), Sanzgiri examines both the possibilities of Afro-Asian solidarity by looking at liberation struggles that extend across the Portuguese empire, the earliest and longest lived of the modern European colonial empires, and the ways in which colonial subjects were conscripted to quell anti-colonial uprisings. The story of Sita Valles captures the many contradictions of this moment. The daughter of Goan immigrants, who grew up in Angola and moved to Portugal in 1968, she was an active member of the Communist Party and was invited to Angola to help with the struggling People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). During the civil war that followed Angolan independence, Sita and her comrades were accused of planning a coup against President Agostinho Neto and disappeared by Cuban forces stationed in Angola. In a lyrical and layered collage, Two Refusals is a collaborative history that brings together interviews, archival footage, and animation, accompanied by a script by Hyderabadi American poet Sham-e-Ali Nayeem and performed by Tilya Fernandes. The insistence on this storytelling, this unforgetting, posits memory, with all of its untidiness, as the antidote to the colonial violence of erasure. In an accompanying text, “On World-Making amid Contradiction and Crisis,” Sanzgiri suggests that, “We must propel ourselves into these complexities and paradoxes—for what else is solidarity but an intricate mess of possibility?” Through the use of parentheticals in each of his titles, he underscores the dialogical nature of his work; the questions they ask upend neatly sanctioned narratives.

On December 8, 2023, around twenty pro-Palestinian activists staged a guerilla action in the Brooklyn Museum, demanding that the institution break its silence on Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Participants unfurled large banners that read, “Brooklyn Museum: No Silence on Genocide” and distributed flyers to visitors listing board members with ties to Israel and the IDF. Sanzgiri himself participated in the action, giving a speech about the role artists can play in such moments. Here a tension emerges between the solidarity that the artist pursues in his exhibition and the space in which this solidarity is being practiced. In other words, what is the Brooklyn Museum (and it is not unique in this respect) able to include and accommodate without significantly disrupting the foundations and functioning of the institution? While Here the Earth Grows Gold includes a statement on the museum as “the resting place of colonial plunder” and “urges [it] to return all the objects with a history of colonial extraction,” the question is about more than the role these institutions have played historically in upholding and sustaining imperial projects. What is the work that an exhibition like Here the Earth Grows Gold can do in a space that is seemingly impervious to the worldmaking it tries to imagine? And are these the institutions that can nurture rather than neuter this “intricate mess of possibility”?