Shubigi Rao

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Rossi & Rossi is thrilled to be presenting the first ever survey of Indian-born Singaporean artist Shubigi Rao (b. 1975) in our Wong Chuk Hang space from 18 March to 13 May, 2023. 

Rao is known for her long-term, multidisciplinary projects, comprising layered installations of books, etchings, drawings, pseudo-scientific machines, metaphysical puzzles, video, ideological board games, garbage and archives. Her interests include archaeology, neuroscience, libraries, archival systems, histories and lies, literature and violence, ecologies and natural history.

Her art, books, films, and photographs look at current and historical flashpoints as perspectival shifts to examining contemporary crises of displacement, whether of people, languages, cultures, or knowledge bodies. As an artist, Rao critically, poetically and wittily examines the systems of knowledge that structure our world. Her immersive and tongue-in-cheek works range 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.

To coincide with the survey, a catalogue documenting Rao’s practice from 2008 to 2022 will be published with an essay written by art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art Jennifer Gross.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Shubigi Rao is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and writer who has exhibited in international biennales and institutions and won accolades for both her visual art practice and literary works. She is also the current Artistic Director of the 2022-23 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, South Asia's biggest visual arts event.

Her current decade-long project, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book is about the history of book destruction and the future of knowledge. The third instalment of the project (Pulp III) was chosen to represent Singapore at the National Pavilion in La Biennale di Venezia (Arte) in 2022.

In 2020 the second book from the project won the Singapore Literature Prize (non-fiction), while the first volume was shortlisted for the prize in 2018. The first volume was also chosen as one of the 50 best books of Singaporean Literature from the 19th to 21st centuries, by a panel of literary peers convened by The Straits Times in 2021. Both books have won numerous awards, including AIGA (New York)’s 50 best books of 2016, and D&AD Pencil for design (2017, 2019). The first exhibition of the project, Written in the Margins, won the APB Signature Prize 2018 Juror's Choice Award.

Rao has also been featured in the 10th Asia-Pacific Triennial (2021-22), March Meets Sharjah (2019), 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018), 10th Taipei Biennial (2016), 3rd Pune Biennale (2017), 2nd Singapore Biennale (2008), and the Singapore Writers Festival (2013, 2016, 2018, 2021, 2022).