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I have been and continue to be committed to art as a tool to ignite, comfort, and discomfort.

Vivek Shraya

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Vivek Shraya
Comfort
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More quotes by Vivek Shraya

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It's exciting to consider how art, in its ability to reveal, can be ahead of the artist.
Vivek Shraya
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I always work with text orally in the writing process, saying passages aloud to measure flow.
Vivek Shraya
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Now is not the time for Canadians to be sanctimonious. It is time for us to be prudent and active.
Vivek Shraya
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My art career often feels less like an art career and more like a career in educating, usually by using my body.
Vivek Shraya
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I would love to see more dialogue around the responsibilities of art consumers - how can audiences better financially support artists we love, artists who are doing the work, so that artists have a more solid foundation upon which to make art?
Vivek Shraya
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I continue to explore poetry.
Vivek Shraya
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I couldn't write about love without writing about hate - specifically, how the experience of hatred embeds itself in the body and prevents love from entering or leaving.
Vivek Shraya
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Children are receptive to talking about gender creativity, confirming the importance of the book as a means to instigate this dialogue at an early age.
Vivek Shraya
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Writing about racism requires a directness that writing a love story does not.
Vivek Shraya
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Making music has been connected to one of my greatest heartaches, because my own music has never quite connected with audiences. But it was this heartache that pushed me to explore other artistic avenues, like writing and filmmaking, and I ultimately feel most at home in a multidisciplinary environment.
Vivek Shraya
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I am always hesitant to call myself an activist, mostly out of respect for the activists who are using their bodies and voices to protest or activists online who are constantly engaging and educating others.
Vivek Shraya
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I recently did a reading at an elementary school in Ottawa, and one of the children asked me if I was a girl. I said yes. Another child commented that I had a deep voice. I responded: Can girls have deep voices? There was a pause and then the group responded, Yes!
Vivek Shraya
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In my thirties, I have felt a greater urgency to make art that highlights what it feels like to be racialized, likely due to living in a country that obscures our racism with the idea of multiculturalism.
Vivek Shraya
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I used singing as a safety measure. I would pay attention to what songs the popular girls liked, learn those songs from the radio or library cassettes, and then accidentally sing or hum these songs in class. This would impress the girls, who would then defend me from the boys.
Vivek Shraya
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I didn't want to give the white reader an opportunity to think of racism as imaginary - a sentiment that is already a central barrier in addressing the problem.
Vivek Shraya
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As a general rule, I tend to collaborate with artists whose work I admire.
Vivek Shraya
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When I wouldn't leave home without my blue contacts or when I was bleaching my hair, I didn't have the language to articulate that I was trying to assimilate to whiteness. If anything, I was trying to look normal.
Vivek Shraya
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I have always considered the aesthetic of a project, including press photos, as a means to further the message of the art itself.
Vivek Shraya
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Art can sometimes be separate from the artist.
Vivek Shraya
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When I do book readings, I always incorporate music or singing.
Vivek Shraya