Shubigi Rao

Shubigi Rao (born 1975) is an Indian-born Singaporean contemporary artist and writer known for her long-term, multidisciplinary projects and installation works that often use books, etchings, drawings, video, and archives. Her interests include archaeology, libraries, neuroscience, histories and lies, literature and violence, and natural history. In 2024 Rao won the Singapore Literature Prize in Creative Nonfiction for her book, 'Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book', after having previously won the same prize in 2020 for Pulp II: A Visual Bibliography of the Banished Book. The first volume from the Pulp project was also shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018.

Rao curated the fifth edition of South Asia's biggest visual arts event, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which was initially planned to take place from December 2020 to April 2021, before being postponed to 2022 due to COVID-19. Alongside Kochi-Muziris Biennale founder and artist Bose Krishnamachari, Rao was featured on the 2019 and 2020 editions of the ArtReview Power 100 list, which charts the most influential individuals working in contemporary art.

In 2022, Rao represented Singapore at the 59th Venice Biennale with the project Pulp III: A Short Biography of The Banished Book, with Ute Meta Bauer as curator for the artistic team.

Education and personal life Rao was born in 1975 in Mumbai, and grew up in the Himalaya. She is currently based in Singapore. The exhibition assembled some of Rao's works from the past 10 years that was based around the figure of Raoul. The exhibition was accompanied by the publication, History's Malcontents: The Life And Times of S. Raoul, which served both as a guide to the character of Raoul, and to a selection of Rao’s works beyond the show itself.

From June 2016 to May 2017, as an international artist-in-residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Rao would develop the first instalment of the Pulp project, Written in the Margins (2014–2016). In 2018, she would receive the Juror's Choice Award at the APB Foundation Signature Art Prize for Written in the Margins. Here, she would launch the second volume of her project, titled Pulp II: A Visual Bibliography of the Banished Book. She would be featured alongside Krishnamachari on the ArtReview Power 100 list once again in 2020.

Rao represented Singapore with 'Pulp III' at the Singapore Pavilion for the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, with Ute Meta Bauer serving as curator for the artistic team. The Arts Newspaper, and Weltkunst among others, and garnered significant media and public attention.

Her solo exhibition in 2022-2023 These Petrified Paths on the destruction of cultural heritage in Armenia and the complicity of oil geopolitics, included a feature film and an exhibition that occupied four floors of the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, China. Curated by X-Zhu Nowell, the exhibition was widely reviewed. Elements of the exhibition and the film have been shown at Vienna Contemporary and Salzburger Kunstverein, Austria, and will also feature in the upcoming 16th Sharjah Biennale.

In 2024 she was featured in the Phaidon Vitamin series - Vitamin Txt

Art

S. Raoul As part of her projects from 2003 to 2013, Rao assumed the identity of S. Raoul, a fictional archaeologist, scientist, and theorist, whose interests spanned immortal jellyfish to the risks of brain damage posed by contemporary art. Rao's interests were expressed through the persona of Raoul, which included archaeological studies of contemporary Singapore in works such as The Study of Leftovers, Pseudoscience in Suitcase, and Earth=Unearth.

Originally commissioned for the 2008 Singapore Biennale, The Tuning Fork of the Mind involves a tongue-in-cheek brain scan conducted through a series of steps that revealed the supposedly damaging effects of exposure to contemporary art upon one's brain.

Pulp Initiated in 2014, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book is Rao's current ongoing 10-year film, book, and visual art project, with Rao visiting various collections both public and private, libraries, and archives internationally for research. The project examines the history of book destruction, censorship, and various other forms of repression, conceiving of the book as a symbol of resistance, focusing on instances such as the 1992 shelling of Sarajevo's national library.

The first instalment of the project, Written in the Margins (2014–2016), was presented at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin in 2016 and the APB Foundation Signature Art Prize exhibition in Singapore in 2018. This installation featured drawings, books, and an interactive archive of video testimonials from activists and individuals involved in saving or destroying books, such as Firefighters who attempted to save the burning national library of Sarajevo during civil unrest in the 1990s, or smugglers of books and paintings who brought these objects to safety during that period. Three of five planned volumes of books have been published for the project, the first being Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, the second, Pulp II: A Visual Bibliography of the Banished Book', and the third Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book.

Awards In 2024 Rao won the Singapore Literature Prize in Creative Nonfiction for her book, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book. In 2020, Rao also won the Singapore Literature Prize (Creative Nonfiction) for her book Pulp II: A Visual Bibliography of the Banished Book. Rao also won the Juror's Choice Award at the APB Foundation Signature Art Prize 2018 for the first instalment of the Pulp project, Written in the Margins (2014–2016). Rao has also been commissioned by Singapore's Land Transport Authority to develop a public artwork for the Stevens interchange on the upcoming Thomson–East Coast MRT line. She has been awarded the Creation Grant (2019, 2013), and the Presentation Grant (2023, 2018, 2013, 2012), from the National Arts Council Singapore, and was awarded the Winston Oh Travel Award in 2005.

Selected exhibitions and projects

Some of the information in the table above was obtained from Shubigi Rao's artist CV from 21 February 2016, archived and accessed on 27 July 2023.