Shubigi Rao's Pulp III launches at Venice Biennale Singapore Pavilion exploring book survival

Shubigi Rao will present Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book at the Singapore Pavilion during the 59th Venice Biennale from April 23 to November 27. The India-born, Singapore-based artist's decade-long multimedia project Pulp, initiated in 2013, documents histories of book destruction and survival. Her Venice installation includes a book, film, and paper maze focusing on resistance through preserved knowledge. Rao's work references Heinrich Heine's 1823 observation linking book burning to human violence, examining this through contemporary threats to expression. Previous volumes include Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book (2016) and Pulp II: A Visual History of the Banned Book (2018), which won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2020. The new film Talking Leaves (2022) features Singaporean scholar Faris Joraimi discussing batik textiles as cultural text. Rao highlights Baynatna, an Arabic-language library in Berlin founded by a Syrian refugee, as an inspirational model. Her research spans destroyed archives like Sarajevo's Vijećnica library, bombed in 1992, and includes non-textual repositories like animal alarm calls. Rao previously created under pseudonym S. Raoul, producing works like History's Malcontents: The Life and Times of S. Raoul (2013). She studied at Delhi University and Lasalle College of the Arts, teaching there for 11 years. Rao will also serve as artistic director for the postponed Kochi-Muziris Biennale opening in December.