The Brooklyn Museum Awards Fourth Annual UOVO Prize to Suneil Sanzgiri

The Brooklyn Museum will award Suneil Sanzgiri the fourth annual UOVO Prize, which recognizes the work of emerging Brooklyn-based artists. Sanzgiri. He 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.

“I am so honored to be the recipient of the UOVO Prize,” says Sanzgiri. “I’m looking forward to expanding my practice into the museum space with my first solo show, and I’m excited to share with audiences a series of new works centered on my first feature- length film, which seeks to encourage inquiry into mutual struggle and intertwined histories of liberation within the Global South. I hope viewers in Brooklyn and beyond will form their own connections between histories of the past and struggles today.”

Anne Pasternak, Shelby White and Leon Levy Director, Brooklyn Museum, says, “The UOVO Prize’s impact on artists has been breathtaking. Now, as the first filmmaker to be awarded the prize, Sanzgiri joins a growing consortium of artists receiving accolades for beautifully and thoughtfully tackling the important issues affecting contemporary society.”

Steven Guttman, UOVO Founder and Cochairman, adds, “We are privileged to join the Brooklyn Museum in announcing Suneil Sanzgiri as the fourth recipient of the UOVO Prize. It is an honor to continue to provide a platform for local artists to express their vision to our community, and we are excited to support the first feature-length film to be included as part of the UOVO Prize.”

Previous UOVO Prize winners are John Edmonds, Baseera Khan, and Oscar yi Hou. Oscar yi Hou: East of sun, west of moon is on view in the Brooklyn Museum’s Ingrassia Gallery of Contemporary Art through September 17, 2023, and yi Hou’s work Flock together, aka: a mural family portrait (2022) is on view at UOVO’s Bushwick facility until July 2023.

About Suneil Sanzgiri
Suneil Sanzgiri’s work has been screened extensively at festivals and arts venues around the world, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, True/False Film Fest, 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. In addition to Sentient.Art.Film’s inaugural Line of Sight Fellowship, Sanzgiri has completed residencies and fellowships at SOMA, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, and Flaherty NYC. His work has been supported by grants from Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, Field of Vision, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. 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 graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a master of science in art, culture, and technology in 2017. He is currently working on his first feature-length film.