SHUBIGI RAO / PULP I–IV

Destruction of books, assaults on libraries, erasure of women’s voices, and loss of languages — in Shubigi Rao’s exhibition, we encounter histories of cultural destruction and the resistance that has emerged in its wake. Through film, annotated photographs, books and drawings, the artist takes us to libraries, archives, and private collections in places scarred by conflict, from Sarajevo to Manila. Rao’s work is informed by interviews with librarians, scholars, and activists who hide banned books, rescue water-damaged collections, publish forbidden manuscripts, and construct networks for sharing knowledge. 

Shubigi Rao (b. 1975, Mumbai) is an artist, writer, and filmmaker based in Singapore, which she represented at the Venice Biennale in 2022. This is her first solo exhibition in Sweden and her most extensive presentation in Europe to date. 

From Pulp I to IV: Curatorial Notes

For over a decade, the artist Shubigi Rao has encountered and interviewed numerous librarians, writers, teachers and activists hiding manuscripts, saving flood-damaged books, publishing banned literature, and creating alternative structures for the knowledge commons. For over a decade, the artist has incessantly travelled, listened, filmed, drawn, and written about books, libraries, loss of languages, cultural violence and acts of resistance. Symbolically, her research departed from Sarajevo, where the shelling of the National Library of Bosnia and Herze-govina in 1992 turned nearly two million books into ashes. Situated in Sarajevo’s City Hall, known to locals as Vijećnica, the National Library was a living monument testifying to the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural life of the Balkans. From this large-scale act of destruction, Pulp unfolds a multiplicity of micro-histories across different geographies that speak to the perceived threat posed by a book, a library or an archive as institutions of memory and identity for individuals and communities. With the transnational flair of a comparative historian, the insightfulness of a storyteller, the perceptive spirit of a poet, and the sharp voice of the subaltern, Rao recounts lives in proximity of cultural loss. While the artist’s long-term endeavour, Pulp, mourns the histories of book destruction, it simultaneously traces histories of book survival. The latter, as personal, accidental and joyful, engender flashes of hope for humanity in dark times and “alleviate,” in the artist’s words, “the sometimes dire nature of this project”.

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As the first comprehensive presentation of this encyclopaedic project, the exhibition at Bildmuseet is guided by the four volumes of Pulp, which branch into films, photographs and works on paper. The book series is the backbone of Shubigi Rao’s artistic research. The book is, for Rao, a subject matter and, in equal measure, an art form tied to specific traditions as any other art practice. Since the first release of Pulp Vol. I in 2016, her process of creating books has been defined by a degree of autonomy characteristic of an artist’s book and a process of self-reflexivity towards this medium. Conventions of book-making and literary traditions abound and traverse from the space of the page to the filmic image and drawing. Crucial to Rao’s work is the tradition of marginalia as an artistic method. Scribbled notes in the margins of pages, marginalia, reflect a wide span of personal interactions with the books from Middle Ages copyists to present readers. The notes in the margins or annotations to books, films, drawings and photographs assert the artist’s voice, challenging pretensions to an objective, closed narrative. 

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The exhibition locates the spirit of Pulp in artworks that preceded or were developed in parallel with this project. These artworks—The River of Ink and The Pelagic Tracts—play out the porous boundaries between reality and fiction. Consisting of a hundred hand-drawn and hand-lettered books soaked by the artist in fountain pen ink, The River of Ink, produced in 2008, is the earliest artwork in the exhibition and foresees the emergence of Pulp. While Pulp captures acts of cultural erasure, The River of Ink performs them. The Pelagic Tracts, the photographs and the film were created in 2018 in the aftermath of Kerala’s worst flood in nearly a century. The three large-scale photographs amplify the experience of destruction, exposing the viewers to scenes of book wreckage in times of human-accelerated disasters such as floods. The related film intersperses accounts of library destruction with a fictional narrative of book smugglers. The fictional book smugglers in The Pelagic Tracts anticipate the book rescuers in Talking Leaves or These Petrified Paths—firefighters, librarians, archivists, writers and activists who safeguard books in the face of violent destruction.

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The books and the films are two interrelated artistic media through which Pulp unfolds its micro-histories. In Shubigi Rao’s work, it is never straightforward where the book ends and where the film begins. The physical environment of the exhibition at Bildmuseet emulates an open library. The installation Pulp IV, Unbound and Abridged takes an architectural form in the exhibition with pages of an open book that are scaled up and extend onto the gallery walls. The cinema space is demarcated by a floating wall made of interwoven sheets that recalls the “paper architecture” designed by architect Laura Miotto for Shubigi Rao’s exhibition at the Venice Biennale. The site of Bildmuseet speaks directly to the core of the artist’s project and her preoccupation with the full materiality of the book. Essentially, what is pulp other than an expression of nature–culture linking literary traditions with the environment, technology, industry and politics? Bildmuseet is located within the former industrial premises of Umeå Träsliperi, where mechanical pulp was produced between 1910 and 1954, with the grinding mill representing Umeå’s first major industry. This process of mechanical pulp manufacture in Europe that started in the mid-19th century replaced rags as the main raw material for papermaking with wood pulp, leading to large-scale manufacture and the rise of the book and newspaper industry.

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With the film These Petrified Paths, Rao strengthens her attention to the role of women in the preservation of literary heritage. The film positions such efforts as another form of women’s labour that remains overlooked. Filmed in September 2022 and spring 2023, after the outbreak of the second Nagorno-Karabakh war, These Petrified Paths traces lines of continuity of cultural destruction from the Soviet era to the present. In the stories of poets and writers such as Yeghishe Charents and Gurgen Mahari, arrested and imprisoned during the violent Stalinist purge, surface the little-known efforts of women to safeguard culture at risk. An important aspect of the film is the transgenerational conversation that the artist establishes between different generations of women writers and activists, giving a historical dimension to feminist emancipatory politics. Acknowledging the relevance of the proto-feminist Armenian writer Zabel Yesayan in their lives, women writers and activists interviewed by the artist find themselves in pursuit of their “foremothers”.

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The exhibition at Bildmuseet marks the penultimate stages of Pulp with the launch of the artist’s latest film, Shadowstitch, shot in the Philippines in 2024, and the presentation of her upcoming book, Pulp Vol. IV, in an unbound format exposing the viewers to its process of making. The book Pulp Vol. IV and the film Shadowstitch continue the inquiry opened by These Petrified Paths, approaching stories of censorship and suppression on a historical continuum and acknowledging women’s unseen acts of resistance. The title Shadowstitch refers to a type of embroidery worked on the reverse of a sheer fabric with the stitches creating a shadowy effect on the front. Shadowstitch alludes to the invisible labour of women and also to the hand-stitched protest banners by female activists in the Philippines. The artist brings us to libraries, universities and bookstores from the Ateneo Library of Women’s Writings to feminist publisher Gantala Press and Mt Cloud Bookshop. Independent publishers, activists, and community workers that Rao has interviewed in Manila and Baguio spotlight the practice of publishing as a political act in support of women’s voices, rights to self-representation of Indigenous peoples, and social justice at large. The Filipina poet Marjorie Evasco’s concept of “actionable hope”—as in hope that you can act on—resonates largely with what Rao’s Pulp has strived to convey for years. In the face of relentless destruction and brutality of political regimes, resistance can still take root. “Paper will trump rock.”

All quotes in the text are by the artist Shubigi Rao.

Artworks in the exhibition

Untangling the Thicket: A Brief Guide to Pulp I–IV, 2025
Drawing on wall

With the wall drawing Untangling the Thicket: A Brief Guide to Pulp I–IV, Shubigi Rao offers us a visual guide to the exhibition. Her diagram takes the form of a tree, presenting concepts, reflections, subdivisions and associations that connect the artworks in her project Pulp. The tree is a recurring symbol in Rao’s artistic language. 

The Pelagic Tracts, 2018
Film, 24:39 min
Series of three photographs

The poetic film The Pelagic Tracts weaves the historical destruction of books and the eradication of languages together with a fictional tale about book smugglers at sea. They are portrayed as anti-colonial resistance fighters. The word pelagic derives from the Greek pélagos, meaning sea. 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. Many archives and libraries were severely damaged. Scenes from local libraries are interwoven with the fictional narrative, together with songs, music, background noise and fragments of literary works, including The Odyssey. The Pelagic Tracts highlights the vulnerability of literature, culture and languages. The film encourages reflection and discussion on loss, migration and colonial legacy.

The exhibition also features a series of photographs from Kochi, taken while the film was being made.

The River of Ink, 2008
Installation of 100 notebooks soaked in ink

The River of Ink consists of 100 notebooks that the artist wrote and drew in, before immersing them in the same ink she used for writing. The ink-soaked notebooks have partially dissolved. Some still show traces of the notes, while others have been irretrievably erased. This is the artist’s earliest work in the exhibition. Even at this early stage, we can see recurring themes that foreshadow later works in her project Pulp. The lines of text that are visible in the notebooks include comments that hint at the dangers of nationalism, war and the destruction of books, and freedom of expression. Some of the lines read: “The Last Refuge of Scoundrels” (a reference to the English writer Samuel Johnson’s statement “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”), “A Tapestry of Lies”, “Confetti”, “To Silence a City”, “To Silence Two Cities”, “White Lies” and “Truth and Privilege”.

Talking Leaves, 2022
Film, 90 min

Talking Leaves consists of multiple stories recounted by a polyphony of voices. The artist compares these voices to the leaves of an enduring tree. The film combines elements of Rao’s research in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Italy, Croatia, the Netherlands, Singapore and the United Kingdom amongst others.

A major thread running through these stories is that saving and advocating for books, libraries, and print is vital for our species. Rao has filmed libraries, archives, private collections and bookshops, where key individuals talk about cultural genocide, nationalism, censorship and endangered minority languages, as well as the resistance that is mobilised. Librarians, archivists, researchers and activists rescue books from fires and floods, hide and publish banned books, create shadow libraries and strive to breathe new life into dying languages.

Talking Leaves is the artist’s first feature-length film. It was created for the Singapore Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale.

These Petrified Paths, 2023
Film, 67 min

These Petrified Paths explores Armenia’s literary landscape in relation to genocide, pogroms and contemporary conflicts. The material was recorded during 2022 and 2023, amid the conflict with Azerbaijan over the region Nagorno-Karabakh. The film brings together narratives about the relationship between literature and the state. It tells the story of writers who were banned, persecuted and imprisoned during the Soviet regime. It speaks of family members and friends who hid manuscripts, before piecing together the remains of the silenced writers’ works decades later, publishing them and rewriting them into history. The film captures diverse strategies that brings unseen into light. 

The film highlights women in literary and cultural history, both as voices and experiences that have been silenced, and as those who have taken the initiative to save, nurture and revitalise Armenia’s literary heritage. The conversations in the film reach across generations and geography. They relate to both past and present generations of Armenians, those living in the country as well as in diaspora.

Pulp I: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, 2016 

Pulp II: A Visual Bibliography of the Banished Book, 2018 

Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, 2022
Books

Part of an ongoing five-volume series, these three books are the core of Pulp project. The books examine the history of language changes, the importance of translation, interspecies communication, print history, online access, marginalia, the systemic silencing historically of women and other groups, as well as the book as resistance.

Pulp I: A Short Biography of the Banished Book investigates humankind’s propensity for destruction using the book as a case study. Pulp II: A Visual Bibliography of the Banished Book begins with an essay on trauma and archives and travels to conversations with librarians, publishers and artists, from Antwerp to Delhi, who share their personal reflections on culture, people, war, memory and language. In Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, we encounter narratives about endangered minority languages and archives of resistance, protests and networks, from Southeast Asia to Europe.

Shadowstitch, 2025
Film, 37:32 min

Rao’s new work Shadowstitch was filmed in the Philippines in 2024. In this film, the artist continues her research into endangered minority languages and women’s cultural work, with a particular focus on the role of resistance played by women in the face of authoritarian regimes.

Here, women are placed at the centre of a conversation about the literary heritage of the Philippines, against a background of historical and contemporary events. The Philippines has experienced both Spanish and American colonisation. The country was a battleground for Japanese and American bombing campaigns during World War II, resulting in much of its cultural infrastructure being destroyed. The Philippines continue to experience authoritarian regimes, censorship and persecution, but is also an examplar for people’s movements and resistance

In Shadowstitch, researchers, writers and publishers talk about the intersections between censorship and disinformation, historical amnesia and oppression, and environmental disasters and exploitation. However, they also celebrate those who are raising previously unheard voices and publishing Indigenous and minority writers.

The work has been produced with support from Bildmuseet, National Arts Council, Singapore and the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila. 

Pulp IV, Unbound and Abridged, 2025
Watercolour and ink on paper, text, photographs, handloom textile

The material offers an insight into the artistic process of creating the upcoming book Pulp Vol. IV. In dialogue with the film Shadowstitch, the new volume travels through the vastness of Indigenous and more-than-human knowledge. The book is based on field interviews and wide-ranging research over many years by the author, who is also informed by her upbringing in the jungles and mountains of Northern India.

Written in the Margins, 2018
Annotated photographs

The photographic series Written in the Margins is drawn from the artist’s research in Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, France, India, Croatia, the Netherlands, the UK and Germany, that fed into the films Talking Leaves (2022) and Written in the Margins (2018) and the artist’s books Pulp Vol. I, Pulp Vol. II and Pulp Vol. III.

Each image is annotated in both factual and quixotic.

Written in the Margins, 2018
Film, 28 min

The first in the artist’s series of filmic research shorts, Written in the Margins comprises anecdotes and sites from Pulp project. In the film, we hear a variety of stories about catalogues and collections, the destruction of books as an act of war, and how shadow libraries can support access to knowledge. 

By weaving literary traditions into the language of film – marginalia, annotations and footnotes – the artist blurs the boundaries between text and film. Taken as a whole, the film highlights human experiences of censorship, oblivion and destruction, as well as people’s will and ability to organise and carry out acts of resistance.

Uneasy Truces, Strange Bedfellows, 2025
Assemblage of found objects 

This work is an assemblage of objects collected by the artist in Umeå and during her research in the Philippines in 2024, while working on the film Shadowstitch and the book Pulp Vol. IV.

Written in the Margins and Uneasy Truces, Strange Bedfellows are shown at the Arts Campus Library on level 0 during the library’s opening hours.