Written in the Margins 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.

Written in the Margins is a catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition Written in the Margins at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien. This exhibition was the first time where Shubigi had presented material from her ongoing Pulp project. This catalogue mainly concentrates on research and work made during her residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. From browse-able short, unedited film clips selected from hundreds of hours of interviews filmed during her travels, to photographs and texts (including the first book from the project), as well an inked ‘guide-map’ to the project, the space suggested a reading room within the precincts of the gallery. This way the individual created their own form of burrowing into the interconnecting issues behind print, press, language shifts and illegality of texts.

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.