Shubigi Rao
Waysides
Shubigi Rao’s video work, Waysides, speaks to the deep sense of loss as a result of our disconnect from the natural world. Examining tropical tropes and representations of nature, she unravels contemporary desires that reflect human-centric interpretations of the natural world.
Taking the form of a two-channel short film that exists digitally on the Living Legacies microsite, it draws on footage of Singapore’s built and natural landscapes shot across the island, which Rao has accumulated over many years. The film weaves across residential estates, commercial buildings, the Botany Library in the Botanic Gardens and verge forests. Ranging from colonial representations of text and image to contemporary depictions of nature in our everyday landscape, the film examines the cultural lens through which we perceive, interpret and interact with natural biodiversity.
Part celebration of human imagination and idealisation, part paean to the unseen, the inarticulate and the “unbeautiful”, Waysides is an attempt at articulating what we often struggle to as urban dwellers within a constantly mediated natural world.
a short rumination on verges and menageries
by shubigi rao
edited by aditi chauhan
assisted by raoul sahay
supported by National Heritage Board
Behind-the-scenes
Part celebration of human imagination and idealisation, part paean to the unseen, the inarticulate and the “unbeautiful”, Waysides is an attempt at articulating what we often struggle to as urban dwellers within a constantly mediated natural world.
Artist Bio
Artist and writer Shubigi Rao’s works look at current and historical flashpoints as perspectival shifts to examining contemporary crises of displacement, whether of people, languages, cultures, or knowledge bodies. Her fields of study include libraries, histories and lies, literature and violence, ecologies and natural history. As an artist, Rao’s films, installations, texts, and photographs have critically, poetically and wittily examined the systems of knowledge that structure our world.
Rao will represent Singapore at the Singapore Pavilion in La Biennale di Venezia (Arte) from April to November 2022. She is also the Curator for the 2022 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, South Asia’s biggest visual arts event. She was featured in the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial (2021-22), the 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018), 10th Taipei Biennial (2016), 3rd Pune Biennale (2017), and the 2nd Singapore Biennale (2008). Notable solo exhibitions include The Wood for the Trees (2018), Written in the Margins (2017) The Retrospectacle of S. Raoul (2013), and Useful Fictions (2013). She has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions locally and internationally, and received multiple awards for her artworks and writing.
