Pulp III:
A Short Biography of the Banished Book

Talking Leaves
Shubigi Rao
2022
An unabridged journey into the banished book
Single channel film, colour, 4+1 sound (90 minutes)

View Trailer

Daily Screenings: 11am - 12.30pm, 1 - 2.30pm, 3 - 4.30pm*, 5 - 6.30pm**
Guests are advised to arrive early to collect headsets and to secure a seat.

* No 3pm screening on 10 and 13 Jan 2023
** No 5pm screening on 7, 8, 12 - 15 and 17 Jan 2023

Talking Leaves weaves together the mytho-poetics of legendary libraries, half-truths, hearsay, and contested narratives, forming a lyrical manuscript that is a lush celebration of the unquenchable human need to tell and share stories, and a haunting elegy to waning communities of print.

The film draws on footage from five years of filming across the world including Singapore and Venice, a city that embodies a vital history of print and open access. It depicts, among other stories, how books from a now-defunct archive of women partisans and genocide survivors are rescued. Those at the frontlines of saving books and libraries speak of smuggling volumes out of danger, preserving endangered languages and vanishing cultures, while sharing the sorrow of losing access to personal and collective pasts and histories.

Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V
Shubigi Rao
2022
16.5 × 23.3 × 3.0 cm

Written specifically for the Singapore Pavilion, Shubigi Rao’s new book, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book (Pulp Vol. III), is the third in a series of books that emerge from Pulp as an ongoing 10-year project. The book is an artwork that chronicles the vast array of issues surrounding books, libraries, and communities, demonstrating Rao’s artistic process. This volume brings together new inquiries on Singapore and Venice as historic centres of print along with material that Rao has collected over the first five years of the project.

Housed within an abstract studiolo, copies of the book are arranged in a way that speaks of the monumentality of the book’s format as a knowledge container. Over the course of this exhibition, the installation constantly changes in form as books are dispersed into the wider world. For Rao, each book is a messenger, a time-traveller, the embodiment of our need to communicate, and a rallying call to action.

Being a Brief Guide to the Banished Book
Shubigi Rao
2017
Ink on paper, 150 × 300 cm

Conversation: The Making of the Singapore Pavilion 2022
7 Jan 2023, 5.00pm – 6.30pm

The artist Shubigi Rao, curator Ute Meta Bauer, exhibition designer Laura Miotto, and Vice President of ArtScience Museum and Attractions, Honor Harger, will discuss the making of the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022 and the exhibition in Singapore.
 

Talk: Backstories from Talking Leaves and Pulp Vol. III
13 Jan 2023, 3.00pm – 4.30pm

An intimate sharing by artist Shubigi Rao of the people, events and narratives featured in her film and book. 
 

Conversation: Talking Leaves by Shubigi Rao
17 Jan 2023, 5pm – 6.30pm

Shubigi Rao, director, and Zai Tang, sound designer of Talking Leaves, will be in conversation with filmmaker Kirsten Tan and Executive Director, Asian Film Archive, Karen Chan.

Register here

Shubigi Rao is an artist and writer whose fields of study include libraries, archival systems, histories and lies, literature and violence, ecologies, and natural history. Her art, texts, films, and photographs look at current and historical flashpoints as perspectival shifts to examining contemporary crises of displacement, whether of people, languages, cultures, or knowledge bodies. Rao’s works have critically, poetically, and wittily examined the systems of knowledge that structure our world. In 2008, she received her MA in Fine Arts from the LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. Since 2014, she has been visiting public and private collections, libraries, and archives globally for her ongoing 10-year project titled Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book. As an artist-in-residence at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, she released her first, eponymous book from the project in January 2016. It was shortlisted for the biennial Singapore Literature Prize 2018 (creative nonfiction). The second book, Pulp II: A Visual Bibliography of the Banished Book (2018), won the Singapore Literature Prize (creative nonfiction) in 2020. Both publications have clinched numerous awards including AIGA (New York)’s 50 best books of 2016 and 2018, and D&AD Pencil for design (2016, 2018). The first exhibition of the project, Written in the Margins, won the APB Signature Prize 2018 Jurors’ Choice Award. Rao has also been featured in the 10th Asia-Pacific Triennial (2021), March Meets (2019), 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018), 10th Taipei Biennial, (2016), 3rd Pune Biennale (2017) and 2nd Singapore Biennale (2008). She is the Curator for Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022.
 

Ute Meta Bauer is a curator of exhibitions and presentations that connect contemporary art, film, video, and sound through transdisciplinary formats. Since October 2013 she has been Founding Director of NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, a research centre of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) where she is a full professor in the School of Art, Design and Media. At the Centre, she has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions, most recently Non-Aligned (2020), featuring artists John Akomfrah, Naeem Mohaiemen and the Otolith Group, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Films (2020/2021). From 2012 to 2013, she served as Dean of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, London. Prior to that, she was Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was Founding Director of the Program in Art, Culture, and Technology (2009–2012) and Director of the MIT Visual Arts Program (2005–2009). In 2015, she co-curated with Paul Ha, Director of MIT List Visual Arts Center, the US Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, presenting eminent artist Joan Jonas. Bauer’s current research focus is on the climate crisis and cultural loss. She was an expedition leader of TBA21–Academy’s The Current (2015–2018), which explored the Pacific Archipelago and littorals most impacted by climate change and human interventions, and is the editor of Climates. Habitats. Environments., co-published by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and MIT Press (2022). Most recently, she was the Curator for the 17th Istanbul Biennial (2022), together with David Teh and Amar Kanwar.