Pulp I–IV is Shubigi Rao’s decade-long project presented in book form exploring the destruction and resilience of books, libraries, languages, and knowledge systems. The title carries a double meaning: it refers both to the materiality of books—what they are made of, paper pulp—and to their destruction. To pulp a book means to crush and dissolve it into fragments, a fate shared by surplus book stock as well as banned books.
Rao’s books function both as artworks and as pieces of creative nonfiction, branching out into films, photographs, and drawings that weave together personal narratives and research. They explore how libraries and printed matter, as carriers of memory and identity, have been suppressed, targeted, preserved, or transformed in the face of censorship, conflict, cultural loss, and political repression.
Rao's work is based on extensive research: her works are grounded in interviews with librarians, researchers, and activists who hide banned books, rescue water-damaged collections, publish banned manuscripts, and build ecosystems for solidarity and knowledge sharing.
In These Petrified Paths (2023), records from family members and friends to persecuted writers come together to form a narrative exploring the relationship between language, the literary landscape, and state control in Armenia.
In Talking Leaves (2022), the voices of librarians, archivists, researchers, and activists from different parts of the world are woven together by a shared conviction in the necessity of books and libraries for our collective existence.
The Pelagic Tracts (2018) is both historical fiction and a searingly, critically-poetic work. The film immerses viewers in the texts, images, and verbal accounts of a world where books are the most valuable commodity. The Pelargic Tracts weaves the historical destruction of books and the eradication of languages together with a fictional tale about book smugglers at sea, portrayed as anti-colonial resistance fighters. The film was made for the 2018 Kochi-Muziris Biennale and was shot in the Indian port city of Kochi following the worst flooding to have hit Kerala in almost a century, where many archives and libraries were severely damaged.
In Rao’s most recent film Shadowstich, shot in the Philippines in 2024, women’s acts of resistance under an authoritarian regime are centered, seen through the intertwined struggles of endangered minority languages and women’s cultural work.
Through these film works, presented alongside drawings and installations, Shubigi Rao creates an intimate inventory of banned books and voices, alongside strategies for survival and resistance.
Shubigi Rao (b. 1975, Mumbai) is an artist, writer, and filmmaker based in Singapore, which she represented at the Venice Biennale in 2022. The second and third volumes of her Pulp book series were awarded the Singapore Literature Prize for Non-Fiction, and the first instalment of the Pulp project won the APB Signature Juror’s Choice Award.
Shubigi Rao Pulp I–IV is produced by Bildmuseet, Umeå University.
Curators: Sofia Johansson and Anca Rujoiu. Supported by National Arts Council Singapore.
