Artist-Led Tour: Suneil Sanzgiri’s Here the Earth Grows Gold

Join us on Tuesday, February 20 for an artist-led tour of Suneil Sanzgiri’s Here the Earth Grows Gold at the Brooklyn Museum.

Suneil is a former PW Visual Arts Resident exploring themes of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence and anticolonial struggles. His first solo institutional exhibition, Here the Earth Grows Gold combines new film, projection, and sculptural work to convey the fight for liberation against Portuguese colonialism in India and Africa.

This event is open to Pioneer Works members of all levels. Become a member today to support interdisciplinary production, presentation, and experimentation through our Residency program.

Please note: Attendance for this event will be capped at 30 due to limited capacity. RSVPs will be accepted on a first come first served basis.

Suneil Sanzgiri: Here the Earth Grows Gold

How do we live through and narrate moments of revolution and revolt, and how do we understand these experiences across time and distance? Using imaging technologies to meditate on what it means to witness from afar, Suneil Sanzgiri explores the complexities of anti-colonialism, nationalism, and diasporic identity. His work is inspired by his family’s legacy of resistance in Goa, India, an area under Portuguese occupation for over 450 years until its independence in 1961. Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?), the artist’s newest two-channel video installation, combines archival footage, animation, interviews, and a script written by poet Sham-e-Ali Nayeem. 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.

Here the Earth Grows Gold, Sanzgiri’s first solo museum exhibition, pairs the film with a 16 mm projection and new sculptural work. Modeled on bamboo structures seen across South Asia, the assemblage features family photos, 3D renderings, anti-colonial publications, and images of water and red clay soil from Goa that are drawn from his research. Together these works present the concept of diaspora as a way to reconfigure our understanding of history and belonging.

About the Artist

Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence and anticolonial struggles across the Global South. Sanzgiri’s films offer sonic and visual journeys through family history, local mythology, and colonial legacies of extraction in Goa, India—where his family originates—deftly utilizing and vividly blending together 3D renderings, drone videography, photogrammetry and lidar scanning, 16 mm film and animation, archival footage, and desktop documentary practices.

Sanzgiri’s work has been screened extensively at festivals and venues around the world including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Doclisboa, Viennale, REDCAT, Menil Collection, Block Museum, MASS MoCA, moCa Cleveland, Le Cinéma Club, Criterion Collection, and many more. He has won awards at the BlackStar Film Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, Images Festival, Videoex, and more. Fellowships and residencies include SOMA, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, Sentient.Art.Film’s Line of Sight, and Flaherty NYC. He was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film in Filmmaker Magazine’s fall 2021 issue and was included in Art in America’s New Talent issue in 2022.