Brooklyn-based artist Suneil Sanzgiri’s research-driven practice considers questions of inheritance and diaspora in relation to histories of structural violence and anti-colonial struggle. His experimental film and video projects richly explore image-making, collective memory, and testimony, and are often in dialogue with the works of filmmakers, historians, poets, and activists. Beginning with an examination of his father’s family legacy of resistance in Goa, India, to Portuguese occupation (1510–1961), Sanzgiri's recent works contend with the possibilities of transhistorical and cross-continental solidarity.

Commissioned for his solo exhibition, the artist’s new film An Impossible Address (2025) is the culmination of over four years of research into the bonds of mutual struggle for freedom that developed between India and Africa, against the Portuguese empire. This is the final work in a series of two films that trace the connections between various liberatory figures in India, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau. Central to the artist’s new film is Sita Valles, an Angolan-born doctor and revolutionary of Goan origin who joined the liberation movement against the Portuguese in Angola, and was subsequently disappeared there. In this experimental personal essay, her story both guides and haunts Sanzgiri, as the film pulls at the threads of historical time to expose entanglements with contemporary expressions of empire and the stakes of anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggle today.

An Impossible Address is a kaleidoscopic and sonically vibrant journey shot on location in Angola, Goa, and Portugal that combines Sanzgiri’s signature visual language of 16mm film with digital animation, hand-processing, 3D scanning, and archival translations. Through this varied and material exploration, the film wrestles with its own form to test the efficacy of words and images in times of struggle, mourning, suffering, and action.

Suneil Sanzgiri: An Impossible Address is the tenth project developed through Mercer Union’s Artist First commissioning platform, and Sanzgiri’s first institutional solo exhibition in Canada. The film is commissioned by Mercer Union, Toronto; and EMPAC—Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York.

Presented by Mercer Union in partnership with CONTACT, and Images Festival, Toronto.

Curated by Aamna Muzaffar

• Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. His first institutional solo exhibition Here the Earth Grows Gold opened at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2023. His award-winning films have circulated widely at film festivals and art institutions across the world including Mass MoCA, Massachusetts (2024); Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio (2024); de Appel, Amsterdam (2024); Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh (2024); Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (2024); BFI London Film Festival (2024); Blackstar Film Festival, Philadelphia (2020 - 2024); e-Flux, New York (2023); moCa Cleveland (2022); The Menil Collection, Houston (2022); International Film Festival Rotterdam (2020 - 2022); Viennale (2021); Open City Docs, London (2021); New York Film Festival (2020); and many more.

• Aamna Muzaffar is the Curator & Head of Exhibitions at Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art.