How do we perform action? Do words act? Do we act words? When do words fail us? These questions have always occupied Zainub Verjee’s work, which navigates the relationship between reality and language: the ability to consciously reflect on the nature of language, and the relation between language and other cultural factors in a society.

This exhibition is an excerpt of Verjee’s practice where language becomes the materiality of the form and its meaning. It represents her sustained and long-term engagement with the issues of resistance, activism, artist’s labour, and discourse making—speech, listening and writing.

The works in this exhibition also engage with how vocabularies are appropriated and redeployed into circulation. In the current times when there are explicit attempts to direct the discourse and stifling dialogue that reduces the social into a binary, how does one confront the methods and behaviours of speech? This exhibition foregrounds the relationship between language and voice, action and words, and the tension underlying these contestations.

The Museum of Vancouver and the University of British Columbia proudly present a new feature exhibition, A Seat at the Table, Chinese Immigration and British Columbia. This exhibition explores historical and contemporary stories of Chinese Canadians in BC and their struggles for belonging. It looks to food and restaurant culture as an entry point to feature stories that reveal the great diversity of immigrant experience and of the communities immigrants develop.

A Seat at the Table is an opportunity to consider the contributions that Chinese migrants and their descendants have made to British Columbia, a province built from the interaction of successive and concurrent waves of migration and uninterrupted occupation by Indigenous peoples.

Restaurants and food offer compelling portals to understanding the Chinese Canadian experience in British Columbia. A close look at the food industry reveals the impact of racial discrimination on Chinese Canadians, but it also tells us much about their ability to resist, organize, seek justice and thrive.

The Bill Reid Gallery is pleased to partner on Lifeways, a film exhibition featuring the work of UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture Master students. Bringing together local Haida, academics, storytellers and an international group of design students, these films are part of a process for reconciliation. The stories reflect on self, community and spirit – an epic of humanity and nature coming together under the pressures of social, environmental, economic and political unrest. It is a set of animated stories inspired by the supernatural beings found in Haida mythology. This exhibition explores the formation of identity by reimagining the community, spirit and place we know as Haida Gwaii.