An Impossible Address

Suneil Sanzgiri
United States, India | 2025 | 16mm to Digital | 38 min | English

Haunted by questions of disappearance, loss, and revolutionary struggle, An Impossible Address continues Sanzgiri’s examination of the life of the revolutionary Sita Valles and the bonds of solidarity that developed in the 20th century between India and Africa against the Portuguese empire. Combining 16mm film with digital animation, hand processing, and 3D scanning, the film is a kaleidoscopic and sonically vibrant experimental personal essay shot across Angola, Goa, and Portugal.

An Impossible Address, Suneil Sanzgiri (2025). Video still. Courtesy the artist.
AFK | Exhibitions

Suneil Sanzgiri: An Impossible Address

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. They 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 to Portuguese occupation in Goa, India (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 culminates four-plus years of research on the bonds of mutual struggle for freedom that developed between India and Africa against the Portuguese empire. The work is the final part of 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 the figure of Sita Valles, an Angolan-born doctor and revolutionary of Goan origin who joined the liberation movement against the Portuguese in Angola and who was subsequently disappeared there. In this experimental personal essay, her story both guides and haunts Sanzgiri, as he troubles and pulls at the threads of historical time to examine contemporary expressions of empire and the stakes of anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggle today. 

A kaleidoscopic and sonically vibrant journey shot on location in Angola, Goa, and Portugal, An Impossible Address combines Sanzgiri’s signature visual language of 16mm film with digital animation, hand-processing, 3D scanning, and archival manipulation. Through this varied and material exploration of images, the film offers a study of the pitfalls of statecraft while grappling with the efficacy of both language and image 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.

Reception

Opening reception: Friday, April 11, 2025 at 7pm

Curated by
Aamna Muzaffar
Date / Time
April 12, 2025–
June 14, 2025
11:00AM – 6:00PM EDT
Location
Mercer Union

1286 Bloor St W TUE–SAT: 11AM–6PM SUN, MON: CLOSED

Mercer Union is located at street level and has an accessible ground-floor washroom, with clear, unobstructed pathways within the gallery. Please note that there are no automatic doors at the entrance or washroom.

Mercer Union is committed to ensuring equal access and participation for people with disabilities. We welcome service animals and support persons onto our premises. If you require additional accommodations, please send an email to office@mercerunion.org.

For a map to Mercer Union, click here

(ARTIST)

Suneil Sanzgiri
Presented With:

Images Festival operates on land stolen from the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, the Huron-Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Tkáron:to is currently home to diverse Indigenous and Métis peoples as well as people who settle on this land. As part of Treaty 13 and the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Covenant, we acknowledge that we all eat from the same bowl and spoon, and must take only what we need, ensuring resources are available for all. 

As art workers, artists, and curators, we see the process of untangling ourselves from settler complicity as internal, structural, and ongoing. It is not something to be taken lightly. The inclusion of Indigenous artists and curators into our program is just the first step of necessary and deeper change. Extending from our organizational accountability work, we strive to not only undo forms of complicity, but also actively create an environment and infrastructure that can support Indigenous peoples who work with us. 

Images expresses our solidarity with Indigenous people on Turtle Island and globally. We are committed to continuing to learn, critique, and challenge the settler colonial structures we are complicit in.