PULP II by Shubigi Rao

Since 2013 Shubigi Rao has been working on ‘Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book’, a decade long film, book and visual art project about the history of book destruction, censorship and other forms of repression, as well as the book as a symbol of resistance. This involves visiting public and private collections, libraries and archives globally that served as flashpoints in history, collecting fragments, ephemera, anecdotes, buried secrets and piecing together (through the film, book and artworks) a composite chronology of the conjoined literary and violent trajectories of our species.

Following the release of the first volume in 2016, the second volume from this project was launched at The Wood for the Trees — an exhibition held at Objectifs in August 2018 that showcased the documentation and material from the ongoing Pulp project.

The Wood for the Trees functions as a visual bibliography of the texts, people, and sites encountered during the project. One of its aims is to explore the connective tissue that exists between artists, writers, printers, academics, bibliophiles, shadow library activists, librarians and other cultural custodians, and various defenders and supporters of print and open access to knowledge.

Pulp II: A Visual Bibliography of the Banished Book was awarded the Singapore Literature Prize 2020 -Creative Nonfiction in English.

About Shubigi Rao: 

Shubigi Rao is a visual artist and writer whose interests range from archaeology, neuroscience, 13th-15th century science, 17th-19th century scholarship and exploration, language, libraries, historical acts of cultural genocide, contemporary art theory and natural history. She is particularly interested in unfashionable branches of knowledge and epistemology. Her work involves complex layered installations comprising handmade books, text, drawings, etchings, pseudo-science machinery, metaphysical puzzles, ideology board games, garbage and archives, and has been exhibited and collected in Singapore and internationally.

Since 2013, Shubigi has been visiting public and private collections, libraries and archives globally for Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book. She released her first book from the project in January 2016. She has been featured in many exhibitions and lectures part-time in Art Theory and is a MFA Dissertation supervisor for the Faculty of Fine Arts at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, where she obtained her MFA (First Class), and BFA (First Class). She also holds a BA (Hons) in English Literature from Delhi University, India.