Film Screening & Talk: Suneil Sanzgiri and Anamika Singh with Preeti Chopra

Join Suneil Sanzgiri and Anamika Singh for a pair of special screenings related to . Following the films, both filmmakers will be in conversation with Dr. Preeti Chopra about their respective works and shared themes of power, destruction, and memory.

Registration encouraged, but not required.

This program is co-sponsored by the UW–Madison Center for South Asia.

About the films:

Letter From Your Far-Off Country

18’, 16mm transfer to 2k, DCP, 2020

In this film shot on 16mm, filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri traces lines and lineages of ancestral memory, poetry and his history. A search for solidarity in the sounds and colors of a spontaneous movement in Delhi led by Muslim women, an Iqbal Bano song, images of B.R. Ambedkar – a radical anti-caste Dalit intellectual – all revolving around a letter addressed to a distant relative. Seeking to reclaim the past from erasure, and provide a journey towards a potential future.

Sheetla

24’, 2K, 2025

Anamika Singh’s film follows the Hindi language daily journal Jan Morcha and its role in reporting the highly contested desecration of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Faizabad in 1992. Singh titled the film in honor of her grand uncle, Sheetla Singh, a prominent editor, journalist and union leader in north India.

About the panelists:

Suneil 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.

Anamika Singh is a current MFA candidate at UW–Madison and the recipient of the Chazen’s 2025 Russell and Paula Panczenko MFA Prize. Her related solo exhibition examines the instrumentalization of archaeology in nationalism and control, highlighting the link between urban destruction and architectural construction.

Preeti Chopra is a Professor of Visual Studies in the Department of Art History and an affiliate of the Center for South Asia. Dr. Chopra specializes in modern architectural and urban history, the spatial landscapes of empire, and the visual and spatial histories of South Asia.

Image (detail): Jan Morcha editor Sheetla Singh speaking at the Working Journalists’ Union, Lucknow, India, Year Unknown (Source: Suryanarayan Singh, Jan Morcha)

Host or Publisher Chazen Museum of Art