Suneil Sanzgiri (SMACT ’17)
Thursday, April 21
12:30pm
Virtual Event – Join Here
This talk by artist and filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri unpacks and explores questions and themes around decolonization, identity, diaspora, and cross-continental solidarity. Through his lens based practice, Sanzgiri’s experimental films and installations blend multiple layers of 16mm film, CG animation, desktop aesthetics, and archival manipulation to gesture to tensions, possibilities, and replications of what we find when we search for ourselves in the remnants of colonial histories. Sanzgiri will invite students to think through methodologies employed by various interpretations of “the essay film” and ultimately workshop with students ways of thinking to seek to produce a series of questions about their own work.
Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. His work spans experimental video and film, essays, and installations, and contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence. Sanzgiri graduated from MIT with a Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology in 2017. His work has been screened extensively at festivals and venues around the world including International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Fest, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Doc Lisboa, Viennale, e-Flux, REDCAT, the Menil Collection, the Block Museum, and the Criterion Collection, and has won awards at BlackStar Film Fest, Open City Docs Fest, and more. Residencies and fellowships include SOMA, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, Flaherty NYC, and Sentient Art Film’s inaugural Line of Sight fellowship. His work has been supported by grants from Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, Field of Vision, and the Foundation for Contemporary Art. He was named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in Filmmaker Magazine’s Fall 2021 Issue, and in Art in America’s “New Talent” issue in 2022.
Part of the Spring 2022 Artistic Research Conversation Series.
