Trust the artist to show a way forward, to imagine another world!

Born as a third-generation Kenyan, Zainub Verjee is an accomplished Canadian artist and critic, and has been active over decades in public diplomacy, building institutions and developing legislations. With her appointment to the BC Arts Board, she contributed to the development of the British Columbia Arts Act which led to the formation of the British Columbia Arts Council. Her work in cultural policy-making and connecting issues of diversity and culture trade has been recognized by the UNESCO and for a decade she was involved in the promulgation of the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, which was adopted in 2005.

She was appointed as the Official Moderator for British Columbia for the Citizen’s Forum on Canada’s Future (also known as Spicer Commission), 1990-91. She was brought in as the National Expert for the Vancouver Olympics 2010 Opening and Closing Ceremonies. She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics, Paris, and has widely published in numerous academic, cultural and critical fora and is regularly invited to speak nationally and internationally.

In addition, she is a distinguished artist, and has shown at prestigious venues such as the Venice Biennale (1995), MoMA, New York (1994) and the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (Oregon, USA, 1997).  

In 2020, her decades long work was recognized by Canada and she was awarded the Governor General’s Visual and Media Arts Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Arts. She tweets @zainubverjee

How do you look at the international art scene in the time of Corona? 

As one scans the international art scene at this juncture it is very certain that the COVID19 pandemic has definitely made a direct impact on the art and culture sector globally. Apart from a systemic perspective of closures and layoffs, governments opening their macroeconomics tool box of economy-wide measures, the crisis has brought forth many other issues such as the ‘Status of the Artist’, a reassessment of the role of cultural institutions and its allied extensions like art markets, and, most importantly, the question: What is art?

Let me elaborate.

Arts is not just about an artist or a cultural institution or a work of art; it’s a complex ecosystem— a web of processes, institutions, and systems of knowledge. Here, the economics is not at stake but rather the very political economy of arts. 

Today, it raises the existential question about these as cultural institutions and its constituents: not an economic rationale but its raison d’être as a public good.

The crisis has exposed our hypocrisy. In the lockdown, when one enjoys the work of art — an online painting or performance or reading — think about the artists and their labour. The centrality of the role of artists in society has never been questioned. Yet, the strength or fragility of our artists is in what we envisage, and how we value their labour remains an unattended policy issue.

Today, we are confronted with the questions: What does an artist do? How much does being an artist cost?

The artists’ status, the need to acknowledge the atypical way in which they work, and their low and irregular income are international issues.

It is the irony of the times that this year we mark the ‘40^th Anniversary of the Status of the Artist’ — the declaration made in the 21st session of the UNESCO at its meeting in Belgrade recommending the adoption of the ‘Status of Artist’. And let me point out that the estimated value of art and culture in the the global market is $2.3 trillion. 

The current lockdown in an ironic way foregrounds the condition of exile. Be it Palestine or Kashmir, where the experience of lockdown is a continuous lived reality. What better coincidence than Dar Yasin, Mukhtar Khan and Channi Anand of Kashmir getting this year’s Pulitzer Prize!

Do you think a new form of art will emerge post-pandemic in the world? What will be the nature of these art forms in the advanced capitalist countries which seem to have suffered the most, especially in Europe and the West?

In fact, the Fluxus inspired ‘Mall Art’ of the 1960s is back! This question about the new and next is always facing us with or without a crisis. For instance, it echoes the questions raised after the ‘Arab Spring’ from earlier in this decade, though the notion of  ‘freedom’ and ‘revolution’ has been the leitmotif of  ‘art-thinking’ since the 1980s school of ‘Intifada-Art’ in Palestine and not to forget the earlier phase of the Tricontinental Conference of the 1960s.

I acknowledge that there is a certain kind of pervasiveness to this crisis where the imperatives of public health are dictating the norms. Much will be dependent on how coordinated or disparate we are in responses, how we will engage with previous interdependencies (‘supply chains’ — for example), consequent to the crisis deepening.

Further, the concomitant factor to this is the fact that it’s not just about art, but the idea of work: from the idea of flexible work, gig-economy, now home as a site of work through virtual will be defining other modalities of physical and social interactions as well as productivity. Similarly, from a discursive perspective, the idea of presence and absence will be heightened in the experience of art work.

More importantly, there will be a focus on ‘Local and Digital’, which makes me suggest that the portmanteau glocal will be replaced by logital. Perhaps, there will be a new form of ‘internationalism’ replacing the idea of globalization. Though I do have fears that where art and culture is subsidized, there could be a possibility of resurgence in ‘provincialization of culture’.  The art world will be reconfigured offering a stable form to the ‘new’ shape that it will evolve into but it will be dependent on our actions as much as imagination — which is a contested site.

To me the bigger question is whether this recovery of art and culture will be led by Asia?

Do you think the art scene will suffer in Canada, or has it already suffered damage?

The government of Canada and its agencies like the Canada Council for the Arts have demonstrated a swift response to the art and culture sector during the current pandemic. However, it does not take away from the fact that the templates from the 1980s — earned revenue, value chain, evidence-based policy —are still in circulation like vintage clothing. Down the road, the true costs of the pandemic will raise questions on the public funding of art.

Today, we see the crisis is putting cultural institutions and organizations into a mode of atrophy. As questions of empathy and increased social trauma will prevail, the role of cultural institutions, with a retrenched physical space, will be right at the center of the debate. The artist and cultural institutions will be again called on to ‘problem-solve’ in transforming the social.

The two decades of policy push of arts as a ‘service industry’ does not bode well for the art galleries or museums or art communities or even art itself. Prioritizing economic impact in engaging arts for non-artistic purposes such as tourism has deepened the fissures in the sector. We saw that push through the global cities agenda, and its concomitant and flawed Floridian assumptions leading to the death of the artist and birth of a creative in the gig-economy. This was embraced by the mayors of the cities around the world and facilitated downloading of the fiscal responsibilities from federal to municipal levels in the delivery of arts as service industry.

Further, I am concerned about how this connects to the downloading of  State and social responsibilities on to individuals, and the ways that the culture sector is expected to participate in ‘building a skills agenda’, or promoting ‘entrepreneurship’ or   ‘self-care’. Are we then surprised to see Yoga and Zumba classes taking over the gallery spaces, be it a municipal gallery in Canada or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York?

What about the life and times of indigenous people? How has the pandemic affected their lifestyle, social conditions and traditional art forms?

I am glad that you raised the condition of indigenous people. The pandemic has brought a dramatic pause to the ongoing resistance against fossil fuel pipeline construction through thee Wet’suwet’en Nations    unceded territory in British Columbia. It has reordered the priority of public health with a different gaze. However, a good read of history tells us that this will be a temporary pause.

As we know the 1960s American Indian Movements was resonating on equal footing in Canada, especially with the 1967 Expo and the 1969 indigenous peoples’ rejection and just criticism of the contested ‘white paper’ from the Canadian government to dissolve the Indian Act that was countered by a ‘Red Paper’ which enabled to generate a focus on basic human rights, land issues, environmental concerns and social justice.

I was born into the Mau Mau movement in Nairobi. I experienced displacement across three continents by the time I was 18. The anti-Vietnam War, the Chilean coup, movements for decolonization, Third World Feminism, British Black Arts, and Fluxus brought a nuanced understanding between art and life. For me, this manifested in the form of In Visible Colours, the ground-breaking film and video festival in 1989.

The ‘Red Paper’ (1969), the Kenora Episode (1974) and the Red Power Movement developed solidarity with the Third World Solidarity movements of the times — 1960s-80s. Indigenous leaders from North America were visiting African and Asian countries in solidarity with anti-colonial resistance.

To better situate your question, let me bring into the conversation the Canadian Indigenous Art historian and critic, David Garneau, who says that ‘Indigenous’ is an emerging identity that extends and adapts     ‘First Peoples’ ways of knowing and being to the contemporary moment and to spaces beyond our home territories. Natives from around the world enabled by advancements in communication, transportation, government policies and funding, and driven by a sense of urgency arising from degradations to our persons, our sovereignty, and our environments, are connecting with each other to produce international networks and a collective consciousness.

Art is part of this movement.

In the Fall of 2019, I spoke at an international conference at the UCL, London, while discussing two seminal exhibitions in1989: Beyond History (Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver) and In the Shadow of the Sun (Canadian Museum of Civilization, Ottawa-Hull), along with In Visible Colours, on the issue of legacy and framing of a critical year —1989 — both to underline the questioning of eurocentricity as well as the place of decolonization in comprehending the validity and advent of institutional embrace of indigeneity in Canada (since embarking of the Truth and Reconciliation Process), as well as in the Pacific Rim countries, including Australia and New Zealand.

This perspective is no different from the work of Dr Ganesh Devy and the experiment at the Tejgadh Academy in India, or the Sámi culture in the Nordic countries. This emerging consciousness was well captured in the recent international exhibition— Àbadakone |Continuous Fire |Feu continuel —showcasing the works of 40 indigenous nations, ethnicities and tribal affiliations from 16 countries, including Canada, at the National Gallery of Canada. Institutional work on this front continues such as the recent three-day think-tank on how reconciliation can be undertaken at cultural institutions.

What we are seeing is a strengthening of a rigour of the multiple movements that are interconnected and global in its import, while responding to the emergent aesthetic and agency.

You have worked for long on the refugee question, especially in terms of preservation of their cultural traditions which have suffered greatly and have survived against all odds. How do you look at the future of art in terms of the refugees in their own homeland and in the West?

For me it was the influence of the times. I was born into the Mau Mau movement in Nairobi. I experienced displacement across three continents by the time I was 18. The anti-Vietnam War, the Chilean coup, movements for decolonization, Third World Feminism, British Black Arts, and Fluxus brought a nuanced understanding between art and life. For me, this manifested in the form of In Visible Colours, the ground-breaking film and video festival in 1989.

The idea of minority — refugee, alien, migrant, paper-less/undocumented — is a modern category, a distinct invention by the nation-state. They don’t come performed but are produced and activated through processes of nationalism and nations. And refugee in this case reflects the decline of the nation-state, where the relation of politics and life, if life presents itself as what is included by means of exclusion, can never be bridged.

For a minute, think of the march of migrant labour during lockdown in India or the refugees in Europe!

Here, I am reminded of the British Sculptor Anish Kapoor when he eloquently stated:

“We are demanding creativity of others, recognising that those who leave their country and go on a journey across the water full of danger or who walk hundreds of miles across land are also making a creative act.” 

I used this as the decal and brought into a conversation with Gulzar Quintino’s sculpture titled Refugees at the International Art Gallery exhibition marking the Diamond Jubilee of Aga Khan at the National Pavilion in Lisbon in 2018. Kapoor decided to give $1 million from the Genesis Prize to help the refugees.

As if to juxtapose this, we can see the meaning of the  controversy erupted on the work of Swiss artist Christoph Büchel’s Barca Nostra in 2019 or Tobias Zielony’s images of African migrants in the German Pavillion in 2015 at the Venice Biennale. Similarly, the work of the Centre for Political Beauty, for instance, is addressing the urgent question of the refugee issue, and many are blurring the boundaries between art, politics and action.

Politics and art join hands in action that draw attention to the drama of migration. Taken together, it defines the centrality of the crisis: the contemporary condition.

How do you look at exile and homeland, longing and despair, tragedy, mass displacement and war, and the idea of hope in the new imagined homeland of the refugees?

In 2015, I was invited to give a lecture at the Aga Khan Museum on the exhibition Home Ground: Contemporary Art from the Barjeel Foundation, Sharjah, UAE, where I spoke about Parviz Tanavoli, invoking the notion of modernity and idea of belonging. Quoting Tanavoli’s own words, expressing his ambivalence: “When people abroad question me, I am embarrassed, to tell you the truth. They say, ‘Okay, you are a Canadian, you’re living in Vancouver [since 1989], why don’t you have a show in Vancouver?’  I [don’t have] an answer. Why am I not taken seriously here? Why?”

Later, I wrote a note on ‘Being Parviz Tanavoli’ to elaborate on his lived tension and how he articulates the relationship between tradition and the experience of the modern.

It’s not just the artist who faces this predicament, but even the audience face it, as contemporary art is not always clear-cut or transparent, nor is it homogenous or unilateral, though it is contingent on where the visitor is coming from. Immersed in this clamour of versions and clashing modes of truth-telling, we get a feel ‘from inside’ of the anguish and dilemmas, rights and wrong, presented by the Home Ground exhibition. The visitor is riddled with untranslatable elements, riven with the sense of epistemic non-fit and in-comparable cultural difference. The dialogic exchange happens within the same cultural wavelength shot through pre-given terms.  

I developed this into a provocative essay titled ‘Elsewhere, Within Here: The Politics of Home’, which engages with the question: Is the idea of home in contemporary art practice a creative act of affiliation? 

To me such a normative engagement with the idea of home as an iterative condition in contemporary art is tempting. How does one then define the contemporary in the trope of modernity?

Identity and home are as old as modernity and I questioned, what is the desire of this repeated demand to modernize? So, in exploring the imperial domination of manufactured geographies, we have to approach geography neither as a location nor as a frame, but as a situated knowledge and evaluate how this knowledge is produced in the museum system.

We have to always remember that it is in the nexus of war, citizenship and territory that the mundane and monumental of political life is produced.  As the French philosopher Étienne Balibar says, borders are everywhere, so are the bordering practices.

The idea of minority — refugee, alien, migrant, paper-less/undocumented — is a modern category, a distinct invention by the nation-state. They don’t come performed but are produced and activated through processes of nationalism and nations. And refugee in this case reflects the decline of the nation-state, where the relation of politics and life, if life presents itself as what is included by means of exclusion, can never be bridged.

Despite their tragedies, have the refugees been able to create new cultural and art forms after their forced migration to Europe and Canada from a war-ravaged landscape? Has culture helped in their assimilation in their new, adopted homes?

The current lockdown in an ironic way foregrounds the condition of exile. Be it Palestine or Kashmir, where the experience of lockdown is a continuous lived reality.

What better coincidence than Dar Yasin, Mukhtar Khan and Channi Anand of Kashmir getting this year’s Pulitzer Prize!

I am here also thinking of Larrissa Sansour’s  ‘Nation Estate’ which was conceived in the wake of the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations in 2011; the work comments on the shrinking territory of the Palestinian State and the difficulty for mobility of its citizens. Similarly, I would like to mention the work of  Abbas Akhavan’s ‘Variations of Garden’  which not only offers civilizational understanding of gardens as well as his personal trauma of its memory escaping the Iraq-Iran war. 

To highlight how new aesthetics have emerged in such contestations, last fall, I delivered a keynote titled, ‘Experiment in Solidarity: Third Cinema, Women and Birth of an Aesthetic’ — the visible histories of  ‘In Visible Colours’  at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. It is the intervention by artists in Berlin, like Heba Amin, who bombed the sets of the Homeland series, which speaks of the fact of how multiple sites of contemporary reality are contested by artists in their adopted homeland.

What do you think is the future of arts and culture in the emerging post-pandemic world? Will it become more refined and will it flourish, or will it be back to square one? What are the lessons for humanity and artists?

One thing I am certain about. We will not see something like the Federal Art Project which was part of the New Deal Program in the United States of America during the mid-1930s to the 40s. The locus of institutionalized art and culture has been firmed up as a centre-right ideological position. This is not surprising as it mirrors the broader alignment with the politics of our times.

At another level, this also reminds me of the questions raised after the ‘Arab Spring’ early in this decade. There was a rhetoric of hope and a new dawn. But it did not take much effort to figure out how the revolution was robbed of its promise as the funding to cultural organizations went dry.

So the challenge will be to see what kind of institutional apparatus is deployed and what hinges on the import of their actions — confusion or hope?

Here I am referring to instruments such as cultural diplomacy and cultural policy which inherently define a semantic ambivalence, both in its deployment and stated objectives as they are products of a Cold War framework. Will we have new forms of institutions, new networks and experiments to respond to the ideological contestations that will ensue as we begin to grapple with the 1980s template of value chains, evidence-based policy and earned revenue established by the architecture of new public management of the 1980s with the onset of neoliberalism?

This pandemic brought a significant pause to our accelerated lives. In emerging out of it our hopes can only hinge on three things in my view: that we are able to comprehend the Value of Art, the centrality of artists in society and the very embeddedness of culture in our lives rather than as commodity for consumption.

Hence, I am hopeful that we will heed to what Arundhati Roy so eloquently wrote, about this pandemic as a portal, be ready to imagine another world.

But, then, as my friend Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a Mexican/Chicano artist, says, “We theorize about art, politics and culture, but they [academics/policymakers] have binoculars — we have a radar.

Trust the artist to show a way forward, to imagine another world!