Shubigi Rao is a multidisciplinary artist and writer who has exhibited in international biennales and institutions and won accolades for both her visual art practice and literary works.
Rao's fields of study include histories and lies, literature and violence, libraries and archival systems, ecologies and natural history. Her immersive and tongue-in-cheek books, artworks and installations 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.
Her art, texts, 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’s films, art, texts, and photographs have critically, poetically and wittily examined the systems of knowledge that structure our world.
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Her current decade-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 of the project, Written in the Margins, won the APB Signature Prize 2018 Juror's Choice Award. In 2020 the second book from the project won the Singapore Literature Prize (non-fiction), while the first and third volumes were shortlisted for the prize (2018, 2024). The books have won numerous awards, including AIGA (New York)’s 50 best books of 2016, and D&AD Pencil for design, and included in the peer-selected 'Best 50 books of Singaporean Literature'.
Rao has also been featured in The Colour of Energy at Vienna Contemporary (2024), Encounters at Art Basel Hong Kong (2023), The West Bund Shanghai Art Fair (2023), the 10th Asia-Pacific Triennial (2021-22), March Meets (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, 2023), and the Auckland Writers Festival (2024). Upcoming shows include the 16th Sharjah Biennale (2025), and a year-long solo at Bildmuseet Sweden (2025-2026)
Rao represented Singapore at the Singapore Pavilion in La Biennale di Venezia (Arte) from 21 April to 27 November 2022. She was also the Artistic Director for the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2022-2023), South Asia's biggest visual arts event.
Notable exhibitions include the solos Pulp III at Ngutu Kaka Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (2024), These Petrified Paths, at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2023- 2024), Eating One’s Tail, at Rossi & Rossi Gallery, Hong Kong (2023), The Wood for the Trees (2018), Written in the Margins (2017), The Retrospectacle of S. Raoul (2013), and Useful Fictions (2013).
Group shows include The Colour of Energy I aat Salzburger Kunstverein, Austria (2024), Indigo Waves (2023) at Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, Postscripts of Silence (2023) at McaM, Shanghai, Arus Balik (2019) NTU-CCA Singapore, State of Motion (2019) Asian Film Archive Singapore, About Books at AlbumArte, Rome (2018), the Signature Art Prize at National Museum Singapore, (2018), Ghost on the Wire 2 (2016), Dear Painter (2015), Urban:ness (2015), Modern Love (2014), Still Building (2012), Singapore Survey: Beyond LKY (2010), Found and Lost (2009), Singapore Art Show at the Singapore Art Museum (2007), Second Dance Song (2006), Appetites for Litter: the 8th emerging artist show at PKW (2006), and New Contemporaries (2005).
A featured author at the Auckland Writers Festival (2024), and Singapore Writer's Festival (2023, 2022, 2018, 2016 and 2013), Shubigi's publications include Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book (2022), 'Pulp II: A Visual Bibliography of the Banished Book (2018), 'Written in the Margins', (2017), 'Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book', (2016), Bastardising Biography (2005), 3 pseudo-encyclopaedia under the joint title No Cover No Colour (2006), and Useful Fictions, (2013). Her publication History’s Malcontents: The Life and Times of S. Raoul (2013), chronicled 10 years of artwork and writing under the pseudonym S. Raoul.
Rao's fields of study include histories and lies, literature and violence, libraries and archival systems, ecologies and natural history. Her immersive and tongue-in-cheek books, artworks and installations 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.
Her art, texts, 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’s films, art, texts, and photographs have critically, poetically and wittily examined the systems of knowledge that structure our world.
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Her current decade-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 of the project, Written in the Margins, won the APB Signature Prize 2018 Juror's Choice Award. In 2020 the second book from the project won the Singapore Literature Prize (non-fiction), while the first and third volumes were shortlisted for the prize (2018, 2024). The books have won numerous awards, including AIGA (New York)’s 50 best books of 2016, and D&AD Pencil for design, and included in the peer-selected 'Best 50 books of Singaporean Literature'.
Rao has also been featured in The Colour of Energy at Vienna Contemporary (2024), Encounters at Art Basel Hong Kong (2023), The West Bund Shanghai Art Fair (2023), the 10th Asia-Pacific Triennial (2021-22), March Meets (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, 2023), and the Auckland Writers Festival (2024). Upcoming shows include the 16th Sharjah Biennale (2025), and a year-long solo at Bildmuseet Sweden (2025-2026)
Rao represented Singapore at the Singapore Pavilion in La Biennale di Venezia (Arte) from 21 April to 27 November 2022. She was also the Artistic Director for the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2022-2023), South Asia's biggest visual arts event.
Notable exhibitions include the solos Pulp III at Ngutu Kaka Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (2024), These Petrified Paths, at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2023- 2024), Eating One’s Tail, at Rossi & Rossi Gallery, Hong Kong (2023), The Wood for the Trees (2018), Written in the Margins (2017), The Retrospectacle of S. Raoul (2013), and Useful Fictions (2013).
Group shows include The Colour of Energy I aat Salzburger Kunstverein, Austria (2024), Indigo Waves (2023) at Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, Postscripts of Silence (2023) at McaM, Shanghai, Arus Balik (2019) NTU-CCA Singapore, State of Motion (2019) Asian Film Archive Singapore, About Books at AlbumArte, Rome (2018), the Signature Art Prize at National Museum Singapore, (2018), Ghost on the Wire 2 (2016), Dear Painter (2015), Urban:ness (2015), Modern Love (2014), Still Building (2012), Singapore Survey: Beyond LKY (2010), Found and Lost (2009), Singapore Art Show at the Singapore Art Museum (2007), Second Dance Song (2006), Appetites for Litter: the 8th emerging artist show at PKW (2006), and New Contemporaries (2005).
A featured author at the Auckland Writers Festival (2024), and Singapore Writer's Festival (2023, 2022, 2018, 2016 and 2013), Shubigi's publications include Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book (2022), 'Pulp II: A Visual Bibliography of the Banished Book (2018), 'Written in the Margins', (2017), 'Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book', (2016), Bastardising Biography (2005), 3 pseudo-encyclopaedia under the joint title No Cover No Colour (2006), and Useful Fictions, (2013). Her publication History’s Malcontents: The Life and Times of S. Raoul (2013), chronicled 10 years of artwork and writing under the pseudonym S. Raoul.