CCS BARD

Artists: Simon Benjamin, Keli Safia Maksud, Suneil Sanzgiri

How do official histories contradict and erase lived experience, and how can we expand the potential of memory as a tool for subversion?

Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken brings together recent works by Simon Benjamin, Keli Safia Maksud, and Suneil Sanzgiri that assert personal and collective experience over prescribed colonial narratives. The artists challenge entrenched paradigms of temporality, identity, and liberation by complicating past and present, fiction and truth—or what we have come to believe is the truth.

Working across painting, sculpture, installation, and film, the artists use experimental layering that takes on many forms, from an imagined geological sample, to embroidered scores of national anthems, to CGI and modified 16mm found footage. Their works draw from archives and long-term research to uncover hidden narratives, reclaim images, and reimagine history through artistic intervention. Despite their imperfect nature, these forms of recall become effective modes of alternative storytelling and knowledge building that renegotiate legibility to disrupt the continued deployment of the colonial gaze. Departing from their own experiences, Benjamin, Maksud, and Sanzgiri use memory to situate themselves and audiences across time and place, questioning who we really are in the wake of fractured histories that continue to haunt the present.

The artists featured in Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken uncover leaks in our cultural memory and destabilize received histories by refusing to neatly define or contain time and identity. Through their refusals, they forge new paths toward alternative futures.