Rao Shubigi

Shubigi Rao (born 1975) is a Mumbai-born Singaporean contemporary artist and writer known for her long-term, multidisciplinary projects and installation works that often use books, etchings, drawings, video, and archives. Her interests include archaeology, libraries, neuroscience, histories and lies, literature and violence, and natural history. Rao has exhibited internationally, presenting work at the 10th Taipei Biennial in 2016, the 3rd Pune Biennale in 2017, the 2nd Singapore Biennale in 2008, as well as the 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2018.

In 2018, Rao received the Juror’s Choice Award at the APB Foundation Signature Art Prize for her work, “Written in the Margins” (2014–2016), the first instalment of her ongoing 10-year project on the destruction of books and libraries, titled “Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book“. In August 2020 Rao won the Singapore Literature Prize in Creative Nonfiction for her book, “Pulp II: A Visual Bibliography of the Banished Book“. The first volume from the Pulp project was also shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018.

Rao will curate the fifth edition of South Asia’s biggest visual arts event, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which was initially planned to take place from December 2020 to April 2021, before being postponed to November 2021 to February 2022 due to COVID-19. Alongside Kochi-Muziris Biennale founder and artist Bose Krishnamachari, Rao was featured on the 2019 and 2020 editions of the ArtReview Power 100 list, which charts the most influential individuals working in contemporary art.

In 2022, Rao will represent Singapore at the 59th Venice Biennale, with Ute Meta Bauer as curator for the artistic team.