UOVO has announced that The Brooklyn Museum will award Suneil Sanzgiri the fourth annual UOVO Prize, which recognizes the work of emerging Brooklyn-based artists. Sanzgiri will receive a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum; a commission for a fifty-by-fifty-foot public art installation on the facade of UOVO’s Brooklyn facility, located in Bushwick; and a $25,000 unrestricted cash grant. A jury of Brooklyn Museum curators chose Sanzgiri for the award. Drew Sawyer, Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum, will curate Sanzgiri’s exhibition, which will be the artist’s first solo museum show. Both the exhibition and public installation will debut later this year.
“We are thrilled to present the fourth UOVO Prize to Suneil Sanzgiri, whose recent trilogy of short films greatly impressed the jury. Using a range of imaging technologies to meditate on what it means to see at a distance, Sanzgiri poetically explores the complexities of diasporic identity, anticolonialism, and nationalism,” says Sawyer. “We’re looking forward to supporting Sanzgiri’s upcoming feature-length film project and sharing his deeply thoughtful practice with our audiences.”
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 anticolonial 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—vividly blending 3D renderings, drone videography, photogrammetry and lidar scanning, 16 mm film and animation, archival footage, and desktop documentary practices. Together these imaging techniques dislodge the concept of diaspora from representational tropes and recast it as a tool that allows viewers to trace the effects of haunted fragments of the past.
