Stir Q&A: Zainub Verjee talks about the death of languages, neon, and the status of the artist
Showing at Centre A, the artist and activist’s Speech Acts explores artist’s labour
Zainub Verjee at Speech Acts.
Centre A presents Zainub Verjee’s Speech Acts until August 28, Wednesday to Saturday, noon to 6 pm
THE TENSIONS BETWEEN language and words, words and action have always inspired artist Zainub Verjee—along with the role of the artist in society.
An exhibition at Centre A brings a lot of those ideas together in a multidisciplinary installation, where the neon words “Status of the Artist” glow in the same room as “ART IS THE PUBLIC GOOD”, as metaphorical cardboard boxes lie helter-skelter on the floor below. Elsewhere, the word solitary shatters over a photo triptych of a breaking plate, set above a floor scattered with broken ceramics.
There is more, much more, behind a show that rallies, questions, and exposes the way language can be used to stifle discourse.
She draws on the Nairobi-born Verjee’s long and varied life and career, starting with her education in England and immigration to Canada in the early 1970s, the same decade she made her part in the thriving intermedia arts community in Vancouver. Apart from her practice as a multidisciplinary artist, she’s a programmer and curator, critic, writer, and arts administrator. Among her many accomplishments, she was integral to the forming of the BC Arts Council and she is a laureate of the 2020 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts for Outstanding Contribution. She is currently executive director of the Ontario Association of Art Galleries
Below, Verjee gives in-depth, far-ranging answers to Stir’s questions about the exhibition, which continues to August 28 at the gallery’s upstairs Chinatown hideaway.
You have long been drawn to text, both written and spoken; what continues to draw you to this subject matter in your work?
“Yes you are right. I recollect I spoke about language and power relationships in the early 1990s in a feature length interview with Philip McCrumun, one of the founders of the short-lived Vancouver zine The Boo Magazine. In 1993, I made a single-channel video work, Ecoute S’il Pleut, on the idea of silence.
“Within conceptual art, play with language and its textual representation has been an ongoing practice. What better than to look at the work of the late Garry Neill Kennedy—I am thinking about his work quid pro quo.
“Let me talk of another Canadian—Charles Taylor, the philosopher and invoke his beautiful book, The Language Animal. In this book he grapples with the centrality of language in the understanding of human beings. He mentions that language is intellectual, but it is also enacted in artistic portrayals, gestures, tones of voice, metaphors and the shifts of emphasis and attitude that accompany speech.
“Here in Canada we are dictated by the two-founding nations symbology articulated through its linguistic hegemony. It is a controlling feature which also imposes an aphasia. This aphasia can be seen in the symptomatic mismatch of our socio-political reality and its imagination.
“Every fortnight marks a death of a language. A language dies! What does it mean when a language dies? It means a way of thinking dies with it. Language is not just words strung together with syntax and grammar. Beyond the rudimentary notion of communication, a language conveys its community’s mode of thinking, ability to forge associations with reality and most importantly, to imagine.
“To keep our democracies alive we need to keep our languages alive. We have to keep our relationship with languages alive and thus with our realities.”
“I index this with my triptych on Solidarity - ‘when words fail us’.
“The communal impetus of ‘solidarity’ is replaced with individual responsibility in form of ally-ship. Lean-in Feminism offers you the mantra of individualistic neoliberal self, advancing a capitalist argument and eroding the core issues of equity.
“One work in the exhibition titled––Redacted Terms of whiteness ––foregrounds another modality of redaction and how it plays with language and hence our reality. It highlights the role of redaction in creating meaning for text in varying formats altering political conditions. Given its power in creating meaning and non-meaning, redaction itself becomes an aesthetic statement of power ––to erase, censure, render invisible — by the very power bestowed by the State and its agencies.
“As Salman Rushdie said once: ‘Now it seems the liberal spirit of appeasement of political correctness is a new problem.’ Political correctness and cancel culture are all forms of neoliberal machinations of how to control language and our imagination."
“In simple terms this manifests as forms of closing down of spaces for critical ideas and dissenting ideas in society. Words used in the 1980s have been appropriated in the neoliberal logic and deployed back with new meaning.
“Today, we are witnessing the death of art journalism. Earlier I mentioned Boo. As in the 1990s with the closing of Vanguard, the Boo Magazine emerged in 1994 and folded after 11 issues in 1998. I am sure it resonates with the story of the founding of Stir!”
Zainub Verjee’s Triptych
What is the significance of your use of neon, and what do you think it does to words and phrases like "Status of the Artist" and "ART IS A PUBLIC GOOD"?
“I am glad you asked this question. It is a very important one.
“One response is that for me neon and fluorescent lights are quintessential symbols of the 20th century. It represents the 20th Century’s ideas, its modernization, its ambition and the politics that it embodied.
“It was not only embraced by the commerce but equally by political entities. Neon’s effective ability to spread messages was adopted for more political purposes. One can see the use of neon in the Cold War era and how prevalent it was in the Communist bloc of countries trying to bring the glitz of Western metropoles to their neighbourhoods albeit with political undertones.
“Artists also have a practice and long history of using fluorescent lights and neon. Whether you think of Dan Flavin or Joseph Kosuth who created language based neon works in the 60s. Think of Bruce Newman neons or Martin Creed’s ‘Everything is going to be alright’ towards the end of 20th century.
“I use it because I am playing with ideas whose genesis is in the politics of the 20th century. To me neon offers a great visual representation of critical ideas or key phrases. It makes you take notice. It stakes a claim in the exhibition space.
“The work ART IS A PUBLIC GOOD is a polemical piece, addressing an array of ideas, including the centrality of art in our society and it should be treated as a public good. It indexes the rise of neoliberalism and offers a critique of the dominant neoliberalization of art, its institutions and its political economy.
“Neoliberalism represents an economic system in which the free market is extended to every part of our public and personal worlds. Today, the political economy is characterized by what is known as Neoliberalism whereby the market erases the Public Good and Art is instrumentalized as a tool.
“I spoke about this at length in a keynote on future of artist’s labour.
“A generation or two have grown up with this neoliberalization as their common-sense default, and as well as the histories of the contestation in the early years of neoliberalization (in the ‘70s to ‘90s ) is not part of curriculum of secondary and post-secondary institutions.
“Similarly, STATUS OF THE ARTIST is a 40-year-old issue but with this neon work more people have been talking about it or recognize the term which piques their curiosity. It is a direct reference to the imperative of paying attention to a legal instrument—Status of the Artist. It is indexing the critical issue of artist labour, their atypical nature of work and artist income. Do you know artists earn 46 percent less than general labour? They face the same exclusion in labour laws that farm workers and migrant workers face!”
How has the term "Status of the Artist" been diluted or weakened since its initial declaration, and what needs to happen politically?
”It is an unfortunate history that this rich vision about giving the same status as a professional in labour force has been reduced to a term. There is a long history to it; as I mentioned earlier, it’s a 40-year-old issue. Today, the world of labour looks a lot like the way art labour has looked for decades.
“What does an artist do? How much does being an artist cost?
“The need to acknowledge the atypical way in which artists work, and their low and irregular income, are international issues. The declaration was made in the 21st session of the UNESCO at its meeting in Belgrade recommending the adoption of the Status of Artist. In October 1980, Canada became a signatory to this declaration. By 1992, the federal Status of the Artist Act was passed and it was not until 1995 that substantial provisions of the Act were implemented, but this was shortlived!
“This was reflected in provinces that followed such steps. Mirroring the broader neoliberal policy armature, the provinces have continued to prioritize economic impact in engaging arts for non-artistic purposes such as tourism. This has relegated the status of the artist to the lowest priority.
“The call for legislation is to place artists on an equal footing with other professionals in the labour market and to earn a more equitable share within the economy.
“There is a systemic problem as to why cultural policy remains in the backwaters of the public policy discourse. Artists and cultural workers, I know they are not a homogenous category, need to reactivate the focus on the issue of artists labour. It is imperative to make the Status of Artist Act more robust, meaningful, effective and enriching for the community. For those who might wonder about the value—the estimated value of art and culture in the global market is US$2.3 trillion!
Dialogue/monologue uses cardboard boxes to make a striking statement about the way policies like Multiculturalism can "box in" identities. How do you think that affected artists and their work in this country?
“Artists and writers were the first ones to critique multiculturalism and its hegemonic managerialism of diversity. There is a long history in which Vancouver played a very critical role in developing this critique. [The years] between 1989 and 1994 marked an explosive period and this period is out of curriculum. It is not taught in secondary and post-secondary institutions. Some of the key events that took up institutions and changed the course of history were In Visible Colours, Artists’ Coalition for Local Colour, of which I was a spokesperson, Yellow Peril, Minquon Panchayat, Desh padresh or Neil Bissoondath’s Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada, just to name a few.
“This year is a 50-year marker since Pierre Trudeau announced Canada’s policy of multiculturalism in the House of Commons in 1971.
“The managerial template of multiculturalism emerged from the political expediency of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in the 1960s. Today, it is philosophically defunct. Politically, however, it is still used to package ‘difference’ as a recited truth.
“This elastic sense of multiculturalism is central to the recasting of racism today. Given the increased anxieties around race, we keep seeing the fault lines every now and then.
“The cardboard boxes are indexing the precise social phenomena that led to the manufacture of closed boxed-in communities based on their ethnicities and cultures. It has denied the ability to speak across multiple cultures as one— of solidarity. The dialogues have become monologues within communities. You can see there are festivals for Latin Americans, for Japanese, for Indians, on and on. The song and dance variety continues. It’s about the festivalization of culture driven by the impulse of tourism, not art!
“It continues to affect artists today, perhaps severely and ironically, unbeknownst to them. Despite the claims of neoliberal diversity management a.k.a Diversity and Inclusion practices, there is nothing but a rampant display of tokenism.”
The triptych When words fail us show the word "solidarity" breaking apart as a plate shatters, emphasized by the broken ceramics beneath it. What do you think has shattered true solidarity of artists, and do you think it can be "glued" back together again?
“It is not just about solidarity of artists. It is indexing our social condition. Our broken solidarities! We all have been siloed. We have been segmented. It suits the neoliberal corporate logic to exploit this individualistic strait. It facilitates manipulation of discourse through reconfiguring linguistic modalities, as I explained earlier. As a result, what we are seeing is that the discourse emerging from the corporate world is controlling the social conditioning, and not the social-cultural leaders, artists, intellectuals, workers.
“To ‘glue’ it back we need inter-generational conversations. There is a prevalence of institutional amnesia about the period of ‘70s to ‘90s. We need to insert the erased histories of struggle and resistance into the secondary and post-secondary institutions. The younger generation needs to go beyond a Google search to discover and engage with their history. Given the oligarchy of search engines, a generation has grown up with the belief that if they don’t find anything on an internet search then that thing or fact doesn’t exist. Leave aside the analogue world and lives that lived with it!
“Thus, going back to how we started this conversation — what draws me to this subject matter— it is about politics of language, its manipulation and its contestation; be it a piece of legislation, a redacted document, or a phrase.”
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