Seven-time Lambda Literary Award finalist Vivek Shraya’s new video work Bodyrebuilding is a part of The Polygon Gallery’s new online-only group show, Parallelogram. Shraya’s performance speaks to the healing process of bodybuilding for her, and the process of encountering gym culture as a transgender person. The work, at its core, relates to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Good Health and Well-being.
The online exhibition, launched on June 29th, 2026, is a different direction for Polygon that opens up a world of possibility for artists, regardless of where they’re based. The exhibition runs from June 2026 to September 20, 2026. This new form of exhibition for the Polygon Gallery includes work by Martine Gutierrez, Charlotte Zhang, Vivek Shraya and Skeena Reece, amongst others.
Shraya’s voice speaks over a stop-motion video of her lifting weights. She is shirtless and without shoes, wearing a pair of small gym shorts. Her toenails and fingernails are painted, as is her face, with dark shadow and liner framing her eyes, lips glossed, and curled hair flowing back over her shoulders with each movement. She is framed in the center of the shot, and makes eye contact with the camera, as every one of her movements shows off her toned and powerful body. She finishes off the video in visual references to vintage physique magazines, raising both arms up to flex her biceps.
In the voiceover, Shraya recounts her experience of being fired by her workplace in 2017 for speaking up about microaggressions she had experienced. It was an institution she’d been with for fifteen years, and she was told by her manager’s boss that they would continue to pay her for two more months if she didn’t share with anyone else that she had experienced microaggressions. What followed was physical difficulty: in response to these events, “my entire right shoulder, arm and hand froze - I couldn’t lift my arm, bend my elbow, or even move my fingers.” She decided to visit a physiotherapist, then a chiropractor, another physiotherapist and a few massage therapists. She saw acupuncturists, then her physician, who recommended she visit a sports doctor. Finally, it was an osteopath who told her that she needed to work with a trainer to strengthen her back.
From that point, she started working with a trainer in her neighbourhood gym, Dawn, “Dawn gently reminded me that recovery would be slow because I was trying to undo the damage of almost two decades of computer work.” Shraya did recover, finding in fact, that she liked being active so much that it had become her meditation. But it was also more than that: she liked being in a space where “physical transformation is normal.” She wondered if she could reframe the sport, which she calls “art” in her video’s voiceover.
Shraya does succeed in reframing, quite physically, her art of bodybuilding. Elegantly positioned in a monochromatic scene, we see her hair blow back against her shoulders as her muscles ripple with the lifts. She smiles, she curls, she stares intensely into the camera and we are joined with her in her determination and joy, as she recounts the traumatic events of her firing and subsequent chronic pains.
Vivek Shraya doesn’t shy away from intimately confessional work. In her 2020 debut theatrical work How to Fail as a Popstar she reckoned with the struggles of trying to achieve her dreams, and of the journey of self-discovery, of persistent work and hope. In 2018, she published I’m Afraid of Men with Penguin Randomhouse Canada, a Lambda Literary Awards finalist in Transgender Non-fiction. She reflects on the masculinity imposed on her as a child and its haunting remnants. She thinks about the cage of the traditional gender binary, and the fear present in breaking it. It is heart open honesty.
Shraya’s Bodyrebuilding carries on the path of her previous work. It is an affirming work celebrating the beauty of transgender identity stepping into the world that a strict and toxic gender binary has created. It is rethinking and remaking a space within that world so that it becomes more open, all while stengthening her care for herself.