Uploaded February 2020 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Please like this video and subscribe to support the arts in Canada.
Zainub Verjee is the 2020 winner of the Outstanding Contribution Award for the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts. Directed by Kristin Li.
Production of the Canada Council for the Arts. Presentation of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Independent Media Arts Alliance.
The Canada Council for the Arts is a federal, arm’s-length Crown corporation created by an Act of Parliament in 1957 (Canada Council for the Arts Act) “to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts.”
For more information, visit ggarts.ca
****
Transcript:
I was a new immigrant. I’d only been here two years.
A friend and I auditioned for Institutional Theatre Productions.
Basically, it was an arrangement with the University of Victoria to do theatre with inmates at Matsqui prison, which is a medium-security federal prison.
What I learned in this was the power of art and how institutional interventions can really allow for transformative change.
I’ve been in the arts my entire career for the last four decades, and I have helped shape Canada’s art and cultural life.
The arts in the Western Hemisphere [are] about the Western canon. What we were doing was trying to make the spaces for these other conversations.
I was a distributor at Women in Focus. I’d started in 1987, and very quickly realized that women of colour’s work was absent.
In Visible Colours was an international film and video festival for women of colour and Third World women.
It foregrounded the histories of struggle, then it brought forth the issues of race to second-wave feminism, and it also created a new alignment in the emergent global politics of Third Cinema.
Art has a huge power to make us think and question the world that we live in, and to take action, and to find our agency.
Connect with us on social media:
Canada Council for the Arts
Instagram - instagram.com/canada.council
Facebook - facebook.com/canadacouncil
Twitter - twitter.com/CanadaCouncil
LinkedIn - linkedin.com/company/canada-council-for-the-arts
Website - canadacouncil.ca
Art Bank
Instagram - instagram.com/artbank_banquedart
Facebook - facebook.com/CCartbank
YouTube - youtube.com/watch?v=x9fGIx7hZYk
Website - artbank.ca
CCUNESCO - Canadian Commission for UNESCO
Instagram - instagram.com/ccunesco
Twitter - twitter.com/CCUNESCO
LinkedIn - linkedin.com/company/canadian-commission-for-unesco
Website - en.ccunesco.ca
Please like this video and subscribe to support the arts in Canada.
Zainub Verjee is the 2020 winner of the Outstanding Contribution Award for the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts. Directed by Kristin Li.
Production of the Canada Council for the Arts. Presentation of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Independent Media Arts Alliance.
The Canada Council for the Arts is a federal, arm’s-length Crown corporation created by an Act of Parliament in 1957 (Canada Council for the Arts Act) “to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts.”
For more information, visit ggarts.ca
****
Transcript:
I was a new immigrant. I’d only been here two years.
A friend and I auditioned for Institutional Theatre Productions.
Basically, it was an arrangement with the University of Victoria to do theatre with inmates at Matsqui prison, which is a medium-security federal prison.
What I learned in this was the power of art and how institutional interventions can really allow for transformative change.
I’ve been in the arts my entire career for the last four decades, and I have helped shape Canada’s art and cultural life.
The arts in the Western Hemisphere [are] about the Western canon. What we were doing was trying to make the spaces for these other conversations.
I was a distributor at Women in Focus. I’d started in 1987, and very quickly realized that women of colour’s work was absent.
In Visible Colours was an international film and video festival for women of colour and Third World women.
It foregrounded the histories of struggle, then it brought forth the issues of race to second-wave feminism, and it also created a new alignment in the emergent global politics of Third Cinema.
Art has a huge power to make us think and question the world that we live in, and to take action, and to find our agency.
Connect with us on social media:
Canada Council for the Arts
Instagram - instagram.com/canada.council
Facebook - facebook.com/canadacouncil
Twitter - twitter.com/CanadaCouncil
LinkedIn - linkedin.com/company/canada-council-for-the-arts
Website - canadacouncil.ca
Art Bank
Instagram - instagram.com/artbank_banquedart
Facebook - facebook.com/CCartbank
YouTube - youtube.com/watch?v=x9fGIx7hZYk
Website - artbank.ca
CCUNESCO - Canadian Commission for UNESCO
Instagram - instagram.com/ccunesco
Twitter - twitter.com/CCUNESCO
LinkedIn - linkedin.com/company/canadian-commission-for-unesco
Website - en.ccunesco.ca
