PULP III by Shubigi Rao

Shubigi Rao’s multidisciplinary practice critiques contemporary celebrations of ignorance and culling of knowledge. A glorious tribute and haunting elegy to shared humanity and communities of print, this exhibition marks the midpoint of her evocative 10-year project Pulp, which explores the history of book destruction and its impact on the futures of knowledge.

Based on an artistic method of solo travel and filming as well as building trust and kinship with people across the world, her work is a recovery of overlooked half-truths, hearsay, contested narratives and secrets. Such vital histories have often been deliberately obscured by those in power and by the expediencies of capital. When encountered here, the collected stories become seeds of knowledge that resist erasure and circumvent geopolitical and cultural divides.

Pulp III explores the precarity of endangered languages, the futures of public and alternative libraries, the work of defenders of books, and the cosmopolitanism of regional print communities that have blossomed and waned in historic centres of print, such as Venice and Singapore.

About Shubigi Rao

Shubigi Rao is an artist, writer, and filmmaker working with histories and lies, literature and violence, ecologies and natural history, libraries and knowledge hierarchies. Her films, art, and books critically, wittily, and poetically scrutinise current and historical flashpoints and crises of displacement of people, languages, cultures, and knowledge bodies. Her immersive and tongue-in-cheek work ranges from creating archaeological archives of garbage, writing How To manuals for building a nation and a culture from scratch, discovering and diagnosing peculiar forms of urban malaise where digital dandruff and pixel dust accumulate like lint and cloud the contemporary brain, building immortal jellyfish, to pseudo-museums regenerating mechanisms of knowledge accumulation, storage, and destruction.

Her current long project, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book is about the history of book destruction, resistance, and the future of knowledge. (see here for more info). The first exhibition from the project won the APB Signature Prize 2018 Juror’s Choice Award. Both the second and third books from the project won the Singapore Literature Prize (non-fiction) in 2020 and 2024, while the first volume was shortlisted for the prize (2018). The books have been awarded AIGA (New York)’s 50 best books of 2016, and D&AD Pencil for design (2016, 2018), and included in the peer-selected ‘Best 50 books of Singaporean Literature’. She was in the 10th Asia-Pacific Triennial, 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 10th Taipei Biennial, 3rd Pune Biennale, 2nd Singapore Biennale, Auckland Writers Festival, and Singapore Writers Festival.