Shubigi Rao

A Small Study of Silence (2021)

Full HD video, 16:9, sound

High-definition digital video projection, colour, sound,
duration: 29 mins 36 mins

A Small Study of Silence draws from footage shot over many years, and more recent visuals shot in 2021 during my stay in a quarantine hotel, and across lockdown-Singapore. From narrow verges of unruly, riotous life squeezed between the dead-manicured monocultured green of urban sprawl, this work looks at species under duress, habitat fragmentation and our inability to conceive of the human world outside of a human-centred lens. This film is also inspired by my mother who taught her children how to listen to the sounds and alarm calls of birds, insects, and animals in the jungles of Kaladhungi in the 1980s, our first introduction to the magnificent complexities of interspecies communication.

This film remembers that knowledge, and bears witness to the rapid habitat fragmentation and loss of ecosystems, the degradation of linguistic and cultural memory in animals, birds, and insects across the world, as well as the extinction of a human language every 14 days. This film also recognises the labour and brilliance of native painters and illustrators who are rarely acknowledged for their knowledge and their lush illustrations of local flora and fauna in colonial books of natural history, books that were ultimately tools of conquest and the eradication of indigenous flora and fauna. Originally commissioned for the 10th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 2021-2022, at QAGOMA, Queensland, Australia. Supported by National Arts Council Singapore.

Shubigi Rao works with histories and lies, literature and violence, ecologies and natural history, libraries and knowledge death. Her films, art, and books critically, wittily, and poetically scrutinise flashpoints and crises of displacement of people, languages and cultures.

Her long-term ‘Pulp’ project has won the 2018 APB Signature Prize Juror's Choice Award and twice the nonfiction Singapore Literature Prize (2020, 2024). Recent solos include exhibitions at Ngutu Kaka Gallery, New Zealand, and Rockbund Art Museum, China. Rao represented Singapore at the National Pavilion in the Venice Biennale in 2022. She was also the Artistic Director for the 2022 Kochi-Muziris Biennale.