Kate Sutton on Shubigi Rao and her work on the 59th Venice Biennale
THIS IS A BANNER YEAR for Shubigi Rao. Born in Mumbai however primarily based in Singapore, the artist is representing her adopted nation on the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale and collaborating within the Asia Pacific Triennial. Rao can also be the curator of the Fifth Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which can open in December after a delay of two years. But for somebody wielding such clout, Rao has a prickly relationship with authority and the vectors of energy and data. She has not often bowed to the pressures of the artwork market, bucking conference with back-to-back multiyear initiatives that defy the churn of the business gallery system.
The primary of those endeavors was not meant to final so long as it did. Starting in 2003, Rao assumed the fictive alter ego S. Raoul. (A devotee of Jorge Luis Borges, Rao is equally indebted to thinker Hans Vaihinger’s concept of “helpful fictions.”) The “inventor, theorist, author, iconoclast and eccentric polymath” offered Rao with the ambiguously gendered cowl to publish a collection of pun-rich, intellectually indulgent hand-bound books with titles like Flotsam: An Elucidation of Jetsam (2005) and Bastardising Biography: An Extraordinary Initiative (2006), all bearing the identical mischievous writer picture displaying the artist smirking within the half-hearted drag of a pencil mustache. Amongst Raoul’s crowning achievements was a trio of turgidly pedantic coffee-table books, printed in 2006 and parodying the output of an overconfident armchair professional: Notions of Artwork: Ideas from a Dot, a navel-gazing number of essays and ruminations on inventive manufacturing; Artwork of the Americas: Secrets and techniques Unearthed from Ranges Seven to Two, whose back-cover blurb touts it because the “musings of a caged, barely lit however well-ventilated thoughts”; and Artwork of the UK: The Burden of British Artwork, which consists of an in depth record of all of the objects of non-British origin within the holdings of the British Museum. Raoul later dabbled in neuroscience for The Tuning Fork of the Thoughts (2008), an elaborate (and fully fabricated) examine of the degenerative results of viewing up to date artwork on the human mind. The accompanying set up—full with a devious DIY “brain-wave scanner” straight out of Misplaced in Area, with zany blinking lights and a hidden disk drive enjoying a soundtrack of canines barking and bogs flushing—finally made its strategy to the 2008 Singapore Biennale, the place the safety workforce of a former prime minister ripped out its wires on opening day to make sure there was no bomb. (By the way, Rao felt that this ludicrous gesture accomplished the piece.) In 2013, the artist memorialized Raoul’s life and works in “The Retrospectacle of S. Raoul, by Shubigi Rao,” an exhibition organized by the Institute of Up to date Arts Singapore. Its catalogue, Historical past’s Malcontents: The Life and Occasions of S. Raoul, was a biography-cum-compendium lovingly rendered by Raoul’s ever-devoted protégée, Rao.
The sensation was mutual. Raoul was purportedly an amazing admirer and collector of the artist’s work; in actual fact, as Rao pithily remarks, “it was additionally what killed him.” Because the legend holds, Raoul died trying “to barter house in a cultural context”; extra particularly, he tripped over Rao’s River of Ink, 2008. The bold undertaking noticed Rao fill 100 hand-bound books with a private epistemology, compiling and categorizing all of the data she had gleaned from a lifetime of studying. She then soaked these books in ink, saturating the pages past legibility. The work commemorated the razing of the Home of Knowledge in the course of the siege of Baghdad in 1258, when the rivers have been mentioned to have run black with ink, then purple with blood. This act of unfathomable biblioclasm successfully decimated a number of centuries of thought, scholarship, and poetry; in doing so, it helped tip the scales, permitting different empires to eclipse the huge achievements of the Islamic Golden Age.
Deliberately or not, the work that killed poor S. Raoul would give rise to Rao’s subsequent long-term endeavor, Pulp: A Quick Biography of the Banished E book, 2014–. As at all times, the artist chooses her phrases fastidiously. In line with the agentive potential she assigns books, Rao explicitly labels her work a “biography,” relatively than a historical past. Furthermore, at a time when e book banning has as soon as once more reared its ugly head, Rao’s use of the time period banished angles for one thing else; what she units out to survey should not simply victims of cultural warfare however banished books, these presumably despatched packing from their respective Edens.
Pulp teems with a deep love of the printed web page, whereas brazenly embracing the sophisticated edges of bibliophilia and the darker legacies of print. “If our historical past is something to go by,” Rao writes, “all books are predestined ashes.” And but preservation efforts can have unintended penalties. Like Nabokov and his butterflies, print has a nasty behavior of fixing to the web page concepts that ought to stay in movement. “The irony of folks tales certain in a e book, on a shelf in a library, is an apparent instance of the cessation of the evolving, the silencing of the collective oral,” Rao argues. She additionally factors to the tyranny of the textbook, a method of entrenching narratives within the service of empire. To keep away from reproducing such hegemonies, Rao has designed her undertaking to have a number of versatile installments. Like her physique of labor dedicated to S. Raoul, Pulp was meant to span ten years, with analysis starting in 2014 and a complete of 5 volumes issued at two-year intervals thereafter, however Covid-19 has disrupted this timeline. As of now, the collection consists of two printed books, with the third set to debut as a part of the artist’s presentation on the Singapore pavilion in Venice. The primary quantity, launched in 2016, introduces a number of of the important thing thinkers and case research that body Rao’s inquiry. Some converse to violence towards books as an act of conflict (such because the 1992 destruction of the Nationwide Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo); others reveal perversity within the fetishism of the printed web page (similar to in Leuven, Belgium, the place uncommon books recovered from the 1914 bombing of the library are stored underneath glass and would flip to mud if anybody ever tried to learn them).
Within the introduction to the primary quantity of Pulp, Rao writes of the act of destroying books—pulping—as a method of turning issues right into a “sterile mush.” The artist pulls off the same mastication, condensing hundreds of references and observations, however Rao’s textual content by no means feels sterile; if something, there’s an aura of lively contamination, amplified by the purple ink of notes initially handwritten within the margins. Rao’s a wily author, and also you get the sense that she likes to flirt with hazard. Her sentences wink and smirk; her presence is fixed, and in contrast to S. Raoul, she by no means loses herself in tutorial jargon. It’s simple to take concern with the determine of the artist-researcher (the complete S. Raoul undertaking did simply that). The place affords one simply sufficient gravitas to really feel justified in holding forth on historical past, concept, or politics, and simply sufficient levity to evade accountability. Rao owns these privileges and limitations. She kinds herself as a flaneur in her personal mind, sharing asides on coelacanths and the Koh-i-Noor diamond and pausing to admire the sundown within the bear diorama on the American Museum of Pure Historical past. An omnivorous curiosity impels her Arcades-style stroll by the wonders of the library. “Flipping pages,” she writes,
at all times trumps scrolling or key phrase searches for serendipitous discovery. . . . I’ve but to satisfy an algorithm that may efficiently counsel, with related unpredictability past the preliminary subject of inquiry. Bookstore or library searching is a pleasure as a result of it’s capricious and harmful—there are elements of oneself dormant that wake hungry and ravening after we stumble upon the surprising e book.
Whereas Pulp I bristles with a thorny wit and loads of Borges references, Pulp II (2018) marks a dramatic tonal shift. In the course of the analysis course of main as much as Pulp II, the artist got here to grasp that the tales she was accumulating weren’t her personal. Framing the e book as a “Visible Bibliography,” Rao steps again because the ever-present writer, clearing house for the voices of her collaborators. Previous to this quantity, Rao hadn’t been terribly fascinated about fact; she had at all times gotten extra leverage from fiction. Right here, a collection of vignettes acquaint us with all-too-real figures, starting from the nameless librarian who misclassifies a controversial paperback as “uncommon” in order to guard it from abuse, to the workforce behind Public Library, a digital shadow archive advocating for open entry by aware piracy, to firsthand accounts of the human chain that librarians and volunteers fashioned to rescue books from Sarajevo’s burning library, risking their very own lives in order that the cultures recorded on these pages may endure. If Pulp I had time for inside jokes, Pulp II appears staggered by the surprising energy of the narratives it incorporates, primarily reminding us that libricide issues solely as a result of we cling to books as a method of survival past the physique.
The Biennale offers a recent context and wider viewers for Pulp’s pandemic-delayed third launch, which seeks to reclaim company for the printed phrase. With restricted journey alternatives, Rao needed to modify her method of working; not the flaneur, following one avenue to a different, she needed to lay out a direct path prematurely. Specializing in Singapore and Venice as historic publishing hubs, Rao takes up the case of two vanishing languages: Cimbrian, which historically flourished within the highlands simply north of Venice, and Kristang, which at the moment has fewer than a thousand audio system sprinkled by Malaysia and Singapore. Cimbrian might persist on the web page, however it has slipped out of vernacular utilization, whereas Kristang, the final of the Portuguese creole languages to outlive in Southeast Asia, encapsulates the geopolitical tensions and asymmetries of its area. Exploring different energy imbalances in print, the artist makes room for the tales of ladies who write about different girls (her choice to take action now has specific resonance, as Rao and curator Ute Meta Bauer will make up the Singapore pavilion’s first female-led workforce). Above all, Pulp III (2022) gives its writer an opportunity to digest the analysis of the previous 5 years. If, as Rao has argued, one unfavorable characteristic of print is that it endeavors to ossify the fluid processes of data manufacturing, the artist’s multivolume format has allowed her the house to evolve alongside her analysis.
Kate Sutton is coeditor of worldwide opinions for Artforum.