Barobar Jagtana

Suneil Sanzgiri’s vivid trilogy of short films, Barobar Jagtana, connects his father’s childhood experience at the tail-end of Portuguese occupation in Goa, India with the broader history of South Asian anti-colonial struggle. Through a distinct visual language that builds across the series (whose Konkani title is roughly translated as “continuously surviving”), the films articulate a diasporic relationship to the temporal and spatial dimensions of dislocation and memory.

Sanzgiri combines a range of media techniques to link past events to contemporary struggles with an acute sense for the potential of cinematic and digital processes to be slippery records of time and markers of place. The personal histories and collective lineages traced across the three films unspool not only through the memories of the artist’s father, but across the surface of the images themselves in a densely woven set of visual references. From his use of expired 16mm film stock, archival material, and direct animation, to 3D architectural renderings, drone footage, and composited video calls, Sanzgiri’s films defamiliarize cinematic techniques and ubiquitous digital tools alike to trace a media archeology that forges connections between solidarity movements across time. By utilizing media techniques often developed for military and surveillance operations, however, Barobar Jagtana equally explores the paradox that the very tools we use to communicate dissent across continents are also complicit in the long history and continuing presence of colonial violence itself.

Suneil Sanzgiri will be in conversation with curator Vic Brooks following the screening.

Program

• Letter From Your Far-off Country (2020), 17'
• At Home But Not At Home (2019), 11'
• Golden Jubilee (2021), 19'