Vivek Shraya has never been shy about using her art to break new ground and explore big, challenging ideas. Over her two-decade-plus award-winning career, she’s successfully taken on music, television, film, theatre, literature, teaching, visual art, publishing, and fashion. Now, as the 2024-25 artist-in-residence at the Queer and Trans Research Lab at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies — an affiliated centre of University College — she’s asking difficult questions about the relevance of art in dark and uncertain times.
How has your experience as this year’s artist-in-residence been so far?
I don’t do a lot of residencies, but I was really excited about this particular one. It’s basically a lab, and it’s a group of selected individuals who are scholars, activists, and artists. Everyone’s working on a different project. We meet once a month to talk about what we’re working on.
Being an artist can feel very insular. You’re in your own world, your own mind, your own process. Having these regular meetings with other queer people, other trans people, especially in this particular climate and cultural moment — I found it very grounding just to be around other people who are thinking about how to move forward.
What have you been working on?
I originally pitched a new album, and then, when I got accepted into the program, I pivoted. I created a graphic novel a few years ago called Death Threat, which was based on a series of visceral and oddly kind of poetic hate mail I’d received from an individual. The idea was to dismantle the hatefulness in these messages and poke fun at it.
This individual has continued to regularly message me for about eight years, so the first half of my residency was looking at these messages and trying to turn them into songs for a potential musical. But then Trump got elected, and suddenly, I found myself uninterested in exploring a trans femme being harassed on a day-to-day basis. I went back to my original pitch. At the end of the residency, there’ll be a sneak preview, and then, the album will come out officially in October.
As someone who has had feet in both worlds, what role do you think academia should play in supporting art?
I’ve worked in academic institutions for most of my adult life. There’s this idea that academia is the beacon of progress where there are new ideas and fresh thinkers. In my experience, you sometimes get people who are very attached to old ways of thinking.
Artists are quite the opposite. Bringing artists into academic spaces can be super-generative and can help move things along, but only if there’s a willingness within the institution. The Bonham Centre has done an incredible job of creating a space where scholars, activists, and artists are brought together. They really seem to understand what it means to work with artists. I felt nothing but a lot of support and care from them. What they’re doing is so special and quite unique.
What do you see as your role as an artist in political times such as these?
There is such a pressure to educate when you are a marginalized artist, and there isn’t always a space just to make art. I’ve been quite vocal about pushing to create more opportunities for trans people, queer people, and people of colour to make work that we want to make: work that’s not necessarily focused on our traumas or our differences. We should have the space to pursue and explore whatever we want.
However, when Trump got re-elected, I woke up the next morning thinking the most important thing I could do was actually be as vocal, as trans, and as queer as possible.
To answer your question about the role of art? I don’t know. It is something I’m still grappling with. Art doesn’t necessarily need to be hopeful, but there needs to be an element of possibility. Even if it’s a cautionary tale, you need to be able to see the other side.
Since the death of George Floyd in 2020, we’ve seen this huge boomerang effect. The backlash to diversity has been severe. For marginalized communities, I think the future feels not just uncertain, not just tenuous, but ominous. How are you dealing with those feelings?
I’m feeling the way you are. My generation has been quite protected in terms of global catastrophes and calamities and from this idea of progress reversing. To be part of a historical moment where the incredible progress that activists have fought for, for decades, has … been undone so quickly is shocking and terrifying, to be honest.
I’m often asking, “What am I doing here?” “What are we doing here?” “What should we be doing?” “What more could we be doing?” I feel hyperexistential and hyper-unsure about even what the place of art is currently. I look at some of my friends who are trans activists, and I wonder if that is a better path right now.
I’ve always turned to art. But I find myself wondering if I should be doing more. It’s been interesting talking to my queer elders. They tell me that it’s in these times that people do rally, that people do come together, that new things are formed.
I find myself a little bit unsure and anxious about that, only because I think the past five years have really worn people out. But the other thing that I’m trying to hold [in my mind] simultaneously is that trans people in particular have never been condoned by the law, and still, we’ve always existed. Even as executive orders get passed to attack us, non-binary and trans children around the country are still coming out every day. Culturally, we’ve moved forward in a way that we can’t actually move backwards, no matter what new laws get passed.
You’ve talked about how your art and your process have changed during your residency. What kind of mark do you think you’ve made on campus and what do you hope to leave behind?
I think that there’s a kind of mystery around art making, and artists can be kind of inaccessible. My approach as an artist has always been, How do I demystify? I hope that by the time the lab is done, if people in the cohort feel they’ve had questions or confusion about what it means to be a working artist, my presence in the lab has helped open some of those spaces that have felt confusing or unknown.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Matthew DiMera is a Toronto-based freelance journalist and editor whose work focuses on the intersections of identity, media, and power.
Photos by Vanessa Heins
