“Aquil Virani’s fascinating projects are anchored in the evolution of today’s society,” says Curator of Documentary Art Christian Vachon at Montreal’s McCord Stewart Museum, “giving us the opportunity to improve our understanding of social changes happening today.” According to a list of crowdsourced descriptions of his work by everyday people, Aquil Virani’s art “is like playing Pictionary, except the prompts are important social questions and the drawings are creative political statements.”

Honored as Artist of the Year in 2018 by the artist collective, Les Artistes Pour La Paix, Virani’s collaborative art projects take various forms: painting and drawing, filmmaking, creative writing, graphic design, installation, and participatory art processes. “My goal is to create work aligned with my political values,” reads his artist statement. “Three pillars guide my evolving artistic practice: accessibility and participation, social relevance, and representation.”

Last year, he served as the first ever national artist-in-residence at the Canadian Museum of Immigration, developing a short animated film, a series of portraits of immigrant heroes and a printed book titled 100 Immigrant Stories. This year, he collaborated with the ROM (formerly, the Royal Ontario Museum) to collage publicly collected sticky notes responding to pandemic anxiety in an artwork titled Things will get better. He also designed a grassroots community storytelling exhibition, 50 Years of Ismaili Migration, that debuted at the Aga Khan Museum before moving onto a national tour of jamatkhanas and community spaces.

The central phrase in the artwork, Listen first, comes from a blog post Virani wrote for the Paul Smith publication, The Apollos, several years ago – the basic premise: if we can’t ever fully understand what it’s like to live another person’s life, then our job is “to listen first to these struggles and advocate accordingly.” This support and empathy for others is the most important part of community-building.

Virani’s creative projects have been exhibited regionally, nationally and internationally with financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council and the City of Ottawa, among others. He is driven by a desire to communicate socially relevant ideas in an accessible, interactive and engaging way.