VIDEOTANK #35
Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?)
October 17 – December 13, 2025
Artist
Suneil Sanzgiri
Overview
“Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?)” is an experimental film focusing on interwoven narratives around the mutual struggle against Portuguese colonialism between India and Africa and the bonds of solidarity that developed between the two continents. Told through a mix of interviews and fictional narratives, Two Refusals utilizes a blend of CGI animation, super 16mm film, hand-processed and destroyed archival film to uncover lost layers of world-building, kinship, and the material and immaterial network of relations that developed between historical figures in Goa, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau.
A woman’s dreams become haunted by a mythological titan from Portuguese mythology called the Adamastor—a giant storm cloud formed on the Cape of Good Hope who sought to destroy Vasco de Gama’s ship and prevent him from ever reaching India. Repurposed from Portugal’s oldest work of epic poetry, Os Lusíadas, the Adamastor becomes a figure of refusal but also of failure to ultimately pose the question, “What could have been?”
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 anti-colonial 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.
Sanzgiri is currently working on his first feature-length work, focusing on the bonds of solidarity that developed out of resistance to the Portuguese empire between India and Africa.
His first institutional solo exhibition “Here the Earth Grows Gold” opened at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2023.
