The program EVERYWHERE WAS THE SAME places Basma al-Sharif’s 2007 film Everywhere was the same in conversation with more recent films dealing with diaspora as an indefinite condition. Basma al-Sharif has compared the diasporic condition to one of “bilocation,” the alleged psychic or miraculous ability to simultaneously inhabit two locations (places, temporalities, realities, identities).
The works in this program explore how the trauma and political struggle of a people are borne by individuals in diaspora, often over generations. In Pegah Pasalar’s Lost in Her Hair (Monday), the hair to be tightly braided and covered for a child’s first day of school is ripped furiously from a hairbrush as the artist prepares to leave her country years later. In Mounira Al Solh’s Freedom Is a Habit I’m Trying to Learn, we accompany two women reflecting on the habits and behaviors of their strangely pleasant new lives. In Basma al-Sharif’s Everywhere was the same, a hypnotic, semi-fantastical account of an exodus from an unnamed place gives way to a historic speech, before switching mid-sentence to a song taking us back over the vivid folds of an embroidered dress. In Suneil Sanzgiri’s At Home but Not at Home, the virtual, dual condition of diaspora extends also to the return: If the void left by diaspora can be filled by other places, it is also haunted by the unrealized moments of history.
At Home But Not At Home, Suneil Sanzgiri
In 1961, fourteen years after India gained independence from Britain, the Indian Armed Forces defeated the last remaining Portuguese colonizers in the newly formed state of Goa. The artist’s father was eighteen at the time, and had just moved away from his small village of Curchorem to Bombay for school when news reached him about his home—now free from the oppression of a foreign hand after 450 years of colonial rule. After spending years thinking about questions of identity, liberation, and the movement of people across space and time, the artist finds himself returning to this period in search of moments of anti-colonial solidarity across continents. His research took him from the shores of Goa, to Indonesia, Mozambique, and Angola, finding brief links between nascent liberation movements and his father’s biography. Combining 16mm footage with drone videography, montages from the “parallel cinema” movement in India, desktop screen-grabs, and Skype interviews with his father, the resulting film utilizes various methods and modes of seeing at a distance to question the construction of artifice, memory, and identity through the moving image.
Suneil Sanzgiri (b. 1989, USA) is an artist and filmmaker whose work has been screened extensively at festivals and arts venues around the world. His first institutional solo exhibition Here the Earth Grows Gold opens at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2023. Screenings include International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Doclisboa, Viennale, e-flux, REDCAT, Menil Collection, Block Museum, MASS MoCA, moCa Cleveland, Le Cinéma Club, and Criterion Collection. 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 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.
- Year2019
- Runtime11 minutes
- LanguageEnglish, Hindi
- CountryUnited States, India
- Subtitle LanguageEnglish
- DirectorSuneil Sanzgiri
The program EVERYWHERE WAS THE SAME places Basma al-Sharif’s 2007 film Everywhere was the same in conversation with more recent films dealing with diaspora as an indefinite condition. Basma al-Sharif has compared the diasporic condition to one of “bilocation,” the alleged psychic or miraculous ability to simultaneously inhabit two locations (places, temporalities, realities, identities).
The works in this program explore how the trauma and political struggle of a people are borne by individuals in diaspora, often over generations. In Pegah Pasalar’s Lost in Her Hair (Monday), the hair to be tightly braided and covered for a child’s first day of school is ripped furiously from a hairbrush as the artist prepares to leave her country years later. In Mounira Al Solh’s Freedom Is a Habit I’m Trying to Learn, we accompany two women reflecting on the habits and behaviors of their strangely pleasant new lives. In Basma al-Sharif’s Everywhere was the same, a hypnotic, semi-fantastical account of an exodus from an unnamed place gives way to a historic speech, before switching mid-sentence to a song taking us back over the vivid folds of an embroidered dress. In Suneil Sanzgiri’s At Home but Not at Home, the virtual, dual condition of diaspora extends also to the return: If the void left by diaspora can be filled by other places, it is also haunted by the unrealized moments of history.
At Home But Not At Home, Suneil Sanzgiri
In 1961, fourteen years after India gained independence from Britain, the Indian Armed Forces defeated the last remaining Portuguese colonizers in the newly formed state of Goa. The artist’s father was eighteen at the time, and had just moved away from his small village of Curchorem to Bombay for school when news reached him about his home—now free from the oppression of a foreign hand after 450 years of colonial rule. After spending years thinking about questions of identity, liberation, and the movement of people across space and time, the artist finds himself returning to this period in search of moments of anti-colonial solidarity across continents. His research took him from the shores of Goa, to Indonesia, Mozambique, and Angola, finding brief links between nascent liberation movements and his father’s biography. Combining 16mm footage with drone videography, montages from the “parallel cinema” movement in India, desktop screen-grabs, and Skype interviews with his father, the resulting film utilizes various methods and modes of seeing at a distance to question the construction of artifice, memory, and identity through the moving image.
Suneil Sanzgiri (b. 1989, USA) is an artist and filmmaker whose work has been screened extensively at festivals and arts venues around the world. His first institutional solo exhibition Here the Earth Grows Gold opens at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2023. Screenings include International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Doclisboa, Viennale, e-flux, REDCAT, Menil Collection, Block Museum, MASS MoCA, moCa Cleveland, Le Cinéma Club, and Criterion Collection. 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 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.
- Year2019
- Runtime11 minutes
- LanguageEnglish, Hindi
- CountryUnited States, India
- Subtitle LanguageEnglish
- DirectorSuneil Sanzgiri