Artist and writer Shubigi Rao’s interests range from archaeology, neuroscience and science history, natural history, scholarship and exploration, to language, libraries, and historical acts of cultural genocide. She collects the detritus of our civilisations, whether objects/garbage, or discredited and unfashionable knowledge and ideas, relying on wordplay and humour to explore the tenuous line between existence and extinction, be it human, cultural, species-specific or ideological. Her immersive books, artworks and installations reach from creating archaeological archives of garbage, writing “How To” manuals to pseudo-museum environments referencing the nature of collecting, the mechanisms of knowledge accumulation, storage, and destruction.
In her current ten-year project Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book (2013-2023), she is working on a film, writing five books, and making ink works, about the history of book destruction, censorship, and other forms of repression, as well as the book as activism and resistance.
Shubigi Rao *1975 in Bombay, India, is a grantee of the National Arts Council Singapore.