Please register online at the Webexlink - https://uwaterloo.webex.com/uwaterloo/onstage/g.php?MTID=e3f61082dc4833dd65aba0ae19614f349. For more information on the lecture please send your questions to Bojana Videkanic or Sharon Dahmer.
A prescient provocateur, persuasive champion of arts and advocate for artists rights, Zainub Verjee has over four decades built a formidable reputation as an artist, writer, critic, cultural administrator and public intellectual in Canada and internationally. A firm believer of Art is a public good, she has contributed to international instruments of culture such as Status of the Artist and Cultural Diversity.
Deeply engaged with the UK’s British Black Arts, Third Cinema and the post-Bandung decolonization, Tactical Video Movement, Zainub has been embedded in the early years of Vancouver’s photo-conceptualism movement as well as history of women’s labour in British Columbia. An internationalist, she co-founded the critically acclaimed In Visible Colours: An International Film/Video Festival & Symposium for Third World Women and Women of Colour (1989), a widely and critically recognized as a foundational film festival in Canada. She received the National Film Board Fellowship in 1992 following the critical success of In Visible Colours as part of New Initiatives in Film for women of colour and aboriginal women.
A trailblazer for her generation, her interventions, bold positions and organizing enabled valiantly forging a path for women, radicalized artists in the form of access and institution building. For Zainub Vancouver presented a significantly different axis for art’s political imagination. In 1993, her work on the British Columbia Arts Board led to the formation of British Columbia Arts Council, as well as she has contributed to the formation of many other institutions. An active member of civil society, she was a Vancouver Moderator of the Spicer Commission – The Citizen's Forum on Canada's Future.
As an internationalist, her work in video distribution/programming, curatorship, policy and administration has been consistent and contiguous with what might be termed a critical transversal aesthetic.
She continues with her practice as a multidisciplinary artist and as a programmer/ curator and her artworks have been shown at the Venice Biennale, Museum of Modern Art, NY, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland US, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie, France, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, México, D. F. (Mexico City, Mexico), India, Art Gallery of Alberta, Embassy Culture House (London, ON), and resides in private and public collections (Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada).
She is engaged in a national campaign on issues of Artists’ labour and income. Following her co-authoring an open letter to the Prime Minister of Canada on behalf of 75000 artists, initiating a national campaign, she was invited to Australia to speak on the issues of Artist labour and income. A prolific pubic speaker, in June this year she has been invited by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London to deliver a keynote on Cultural Diplomacy.
In 2020 she was honoured with the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts for Outstanding contribution.