A celebrated Indian American artist, researcher, and filmmaker will have his first institutional solo exhibition in Canada at Mercer Union. Suneil Sanzgiri will premiere a new film, An Impossible Address, in an exhibition of the same name. It will run from April 12 to June 14 at the non-profit artist-run centre in Toronto.
According to a Mercer Union news release, the film continues Sanzgiri’s examination of the life of Sita Valles. It also explores “bonds of solidarity that developed between India and Africa against the Portuguese empire”.
“Presenting Suneil Sanzgiri’s An Impossible Address is a significant milestone in many regards,” Mercer Union director and curator Theresa Wang said in a news release. “For Sanzgiri, it represents an opportunity to expand his audiences and explore new contexts for his work. For Mercer Union, it aligns with our mission to introduce Canadian audiences to compelling artistic practices that speak to the pressing issues of our time.”
Mercer Union describes An Impossible Address as “a kaleidoscopic and sonically vibrant journey shot on location in Angola, Goa, and Portugal”. It “combines Sanzgiri’s signature visual language of 16mm film with digital animation, hand-processing, 3D scanning, and archival translations”.
The Brooklyn-based Sanzgiri devised his film as a letter to Valdes, an Angolan revolutionary doctor who studied medicine in Portugal. Prior to her 26th birthday, she vanished after participating in a coup attempt in Angola in 1997. The daughter of a Goan Catholic couple who lived in Angola, Valdes is presumed to have been executed.
In a previous exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum called Here the Earth Grows Gold, Sanzgiri connected Valles “to the themes of buried truths, trauma, and colonization”, according to an alumni profile in MIT News.
Sanzgiri essays reflect fascination for diaspora
On his website, Sanzgiri has an essay, “On World-Making amid Contradiction and Crisis”. He writes that it “began as an attempt to find traces of connection between Africans and Indians, rooted in my father’s childhood observations of African soldiers in Portuguese uniforms reluctantly stationed in Goa”. He describes another essay on his website, “Diaspora at a Distance”, as a meditation on rising Hindu nationalism and protest movements in the Indian diaspora.
Portugal’s African colonies included Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde (now known as Cabo Verde), and São Tomé and Príncipe.
Estado da Índia, as Portugal’s holdings were called in India, was established seven years after explorer Vasco de Gama discovered a sea route from Europe to the Indian subcontinent in 1498. At various times, Portugal’s Indian colonies included the Kingdom of Cochin, Goa, parts of what are now Mumbai, Konkan, Cambay, and Canara.
Mercer Union presents An Impossible Address from April 12 to June 14. For more information, visit the Mercer Union website. Learn more about the communities that make up Canada on the Toronto Spark website. Follow Charlie Smith on Bluesky @charliesmithvcr.bsky.social. The Toronto Spark is also on Bluesky @torontospark.bsky.social.
