Passion of Remembrance & Golden Jubilee Trilogy
This programme contains 4 films.
Passion of Remembrance
In Passion of Remembrance, Salad Hilowle creates a personal and evocative meditation on Black Swedish identity. Collage-like, Hilowle interlaces archive footage taken from 90s Swedish television with contemporary scenes filmed in rural and urban settings. The result is a dynamic and multi-layered work that interrogates, re-frames and reclaims blackness in Swedish culture.
The film begins with footage of a 19th-century “blackmoor” sculpture in the gardens of the Ulriksdal Palace in Solna, Sweden. This work of imagined blackness leads us to later representations (and misrepresentations) of people of colour from televised media. Through clips from teen dramas, news reports, music videos and interviews, Hilowle confronts us with the limitations and violence of cultural representation. Abrupt edits evoke channel-hopping, giving us rapid and fragmented snapshots. Hilowle also deploys split-screen, carving the screen into four repeated sections, a strategy that invokes the overwhelming presence of media images.
These archival clips are interwoven with present-day scenes filmed using 16mm and 35mm film stock. As a counterpose to the media of his childhood, Hilowle creates his own representations of contemporary blackness. With fluid camera and sumptuous colour, Hilowle gives us tender and sensory moments, connecting the body with the landscape. Scenes filmed in nature bring reflection, tranquillity and respite, and the pace is noticeably slowed down. Hilowle also incorporates moving portraiture, filming a group of young men and women who steadfastly return the gaze of the camera. These sections function as a powerful reclaiming of representation, of Swedishness and of space.
In name, Passion of Remembrance references the Sankofa film of the same title made by Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, another potent piece of cinema dealing with Black experience, identity and personal history. Here, Hilowle gives us a rich and vital work that addresses the complexity and diversity of Black Swedish identity. —Alice Miller
Salad Hilowle is a filmmaker and artist based in Stockholm. His artistic practice revolves around identity, memories and place. Recent solo exhibitions include: Vanus Labor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm (2021); Home Is Where the Heart Is: Part II at Österängens Konsthall; Buurha u Dheer (Passion of Remembrance) at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2020); Home Is Where the Heart Is at Konstfack Gallery, Stockholm (2018); Brev till Sverige at Tierp Konsthall, Tierp (2017); Erinra at Dalarnas Museum, Falun (2015).
Filmography
Passion of Remembrance (2021), Brev till Sverige (2017), Erinra (2015)
Director
Salad Hilowle
Production Country
SwedenProduction Year
2020Duration
26 mins
Dialogue Language
SwedishSubtitle Language
EnglishPrint Contact
Salad Hilowle
At Home but Not at Home
Sanzgiri’s first part of the trilogy unfolds to consider what one does with regret and to ask: what is the correct distance from which to examine its insights? In this film, emails, texts and skype recordings provide attempts at a remote connection with the landscape of his father’s village in Goa, which he has never visited.
At home but not at home begins with an excerpt from a conversation between Hall and sociologist Les Back. Hall describes the diaspora as a space of regret, “a void”, representing an unrealised moment of history. Technologies of surveillance and extraction, like drone footage, google street view and 3d renderings are interspersed with scenes from classics of parallel cinema. As his father discusses the gaps felt in his experiences of “liberation” from Portuguese rule, and of cinema as a young person, ideas of physical, emotional and cultural distances are layered and complicated. —Jemma Desai
Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker working to understand how systems of oppression are informed and reinforced by trauma, history, and memory. His work spans experimental video, animations, essays, and installations, and contend with questions of identity, heritage, culture and diaspora in relationship to structural violence. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology in 2017 and was a 2016 resident of the SOMA program in Mexico City. His work has been screened at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally. Sanzgiri was also selected as a co-programmer of the Flaherty Seminar NYC 2020.
Filmography
Golden Jubilee (2021), Letter From Your Far-Off Country (2020), At Home But Not At Home (2019)
Director
Suneil Sanzgiri
Production Countries
India United StatesProduction Year
2020Duration
11 mins
Dialogue Languages
English HindiSubtitle Language
EnglishPrint Contact
Suneil Sanzgiri
Letter From Your Far-Off Country
In Letter from your far off country, Sanzgiri draws lines of solidarity that emerge from lineages of political commitment in his family. The film finds its purpose in a “found” connection and epistolary exchange: a letter addressed to a “distant” relative Communist Party leader Prabhakar Sanzgiri, and a poem, Dear Shahid, by Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali.
The film’s aesthetic foregrounds intimacy through hand-processed 16mm film, direct animation techniques as well as digital renderings of Kashmir’s mountains. Combining intuited proximity with intentional assembly, Sanzgiri experiments with formal strategies to enact political engagement when producing images and reconsidering archives.
Images and sounds from the Muslim women-led anti CAA protests in Shaheen Bagh are filmed on 16mm film stock that expired in 2002 (the same year as the state-sponsored anti-Muslim genocide in Gujarat). A key piece of archival footage shows actor Shabana Azmi protesting the murder of playwright Safdar Hashmi to an audience at the International Film Festival of India in 1989. The footage, labelled by the filmmaker as a “rare moment of solidarity”, feels utterly unimaginable in the context of the suppression of dissent by a Hindu nationalist government today. —Jemma Desai
Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker working to understand how systems of oppression are informed and reinforced by trauma, history, and memory. His work spans experimental video, animations, essays, and installations, and contend with questions of identity, heritage, culture and diaspora in relationship to structural violence. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology in 2017 and was a 2016 resident of the SOMA program in Mexico City. His work has been screened at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally. Sanzgiri was also selected as a co-programmer of the Flaherty Seminar NYC 2020.
Filmography
Golden Jubilee (2021), Letter From Your Far-Off Country (2020), At Home But Not At Home (2019)
Director
Suneil Sanzgiri
Production Country
United StatesProduction Year
2020Duration
18 mins
Dialogue Languages
English Hindi UrduSubtitle Language
EnglishPrint Contact
Suneil Sanzgiri
Golden Jubilee
Suneil Sanzgiri’s recent video trilogy is shown here, in full, for the first time. The series is bookended by his attempts to recreate the landscapes of his father’s birth place in Curchorem, Goa. All three films utilise an aesthetics of distance and proximity to gesture to tensions, possibilities and replications when we search for ourselves in the remnants of colonial histories.
In Golden Jubilee, the final part of the trilogy, Sanzgiri reconsiders ideas of freedom, loss and recovery in the wake of colonial and neo-colonial theft. The film asks us to consider “what is liberation when so much has been lost?” Reflecting on the contradictions in the pursuit of ‘preservation’, the filmmaker creates a 3d virtual rendering of his father’s home in Goa using the same technologies of surveillance that mining companies use to extract iron ore in the region.
The title “Golden Jubilee” refers to both a forgiveness of debt and the 50th anniversary of liberation. This final chapter of the trilogy moves with a sense of palpable urgency. It underlines both the losses in our personal quests for repair in the shadow of imperial legacies and compels us to look further than the ancestral in our shared pursuit of collective liberation. —Jemma Desai
Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker working to understand how systems of oppression are informed and reinforced by trauma, history, and memory. His work spans experimental video, animations, essays, and installations, and contend with questions of identity, heritage, culture and diaspora in relationship to structural violence. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology in 2017 and was a 2016 resident of the SOMA program in Mexico City. His work has been screened at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally. Sanzgiri was also selected as a co-programmer of the Flaherty Seminar NYC 2020.
Filmography
Golden Jubilee (2021), Letter From Your Far-Off Country (2020), At Home But Not At Home (2019)
Director
Suneil Sanzgiri
Production Countries
India United StatesProduction Year
2021Duration
18 mins
Dialogue Languages
English KonkaniSubtitle Language
EnglishPrint Contact
Suneil Sanzgiri