Born 1975, Mumbai, India
Lives and works in Singapore

Over the past decade, Shubigi Rao’s work has been focused on research into libricide — the destruction of books, songs, stories and dialects — as a factor in broader ethnic disparities and cultural genocides. Under the umbrella title Pulp, this research has manifested as films, installations, and two award-winning volumes of writing and photography.

Rao’s installation A small study of silence comprises a film, photographs and ink drawings — distinct, interwoven elements that serve to illuminate each other and assert the profound importance of communication, knowledge and expression. Rao draws on her formative childhood experience of living within the rich acoustic space of the Nainital jungle, in the Himalayan foothills, where each sound is part of an intricate communication network. These habitats are increasingly fragmented, isolated by urban geographies so vast that the islands of non-human conversation have broken down. Rao likens this breakdown to a parallel one in the human world, where barriers to communication and disappearing languages remain facts of modernisation and globalisation.