Leaf through this exhibition and discover the importance of books throughout history

by Chrystal Chan

Nestled between the Luxembourg and Turkey pavilions at the Venice Biennale 2022, arguably the world’s most famous and prestigious art exhibition, is the Singapore pavilion.

As visitors step inside, a tranquil hush descends as they encounter a gently-curving wall made of paper. A single line of words leads them deeper into the paper maze.

Everything is a soft, soothing shade of white. Nothing here is yelling to be heard. Instead, according to Singaporean artist Shubigi Rao, visitors can feel the quiet comfort of being swaddled within the enveloping paper and remember the experiences of listening and reading.

“Together with the exhibition curator and designer, we wanted to recreate th is intimacy through a lifesize maze that leads you into a private space where you can pause and experience the work, or really, just stare at your phone if you want,” the former Artist-in-Residence from NTU’s Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) Singapore, adds.

Singapore’s first all-women team at the Venice Biennale – (from left) Prof Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director of the NTU CCA Singapore, Shubigi Rao and Assoc Prof Laura Miotto.

Her ongoing decade-long work chronicling the history of book destruction and its impact on the future of knowledge is currently in its third iteration, and that guides the theme of the exhibition, “Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book”. Stories told by librarians, authors, poets, booksellers and champions of open access knowledge are documented in Shubigi’s Biennale-commissioned tome and a 90-minute film, “Talking Leaves”, that visitors can watch at the end of the exhibition.

“In ‘Talking Leaves’, people speak on a range of issues, from smuggling volumes out of danger to preserving endangered languages and vanishing cultures, while sharing the sorrow of losing access to personal and collective pasts and histories,” says Shubigi, who is the first woman to represent Singapore in a solo show at the Venice Biennale.

The pain of loss resonates deeply with Shubigi, who experienced a loss of her own as a child in New Delhi when her house was burgled. The thieves not only stole hundreds of books, but also vandalised whatever was left by ripping off the covers. It was a devastating blow, and one of the worst forms of loss her book-loving family ever experienced.

“The heart of the exhibition is the book. And that’s why copies of Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of The Banished Book have been placed in the middle of the exhibition, allowing people to take a copy with them when they leave,” says Prof Ute Meta Bauer from the School of Art, Design & Media, who curated the Singapore pavilion designed by her colleague at NTU’s art school, Assoc Prof Laura Miotto.

In this way, each book is a messenger, a time-traveller and the embodiment of our need to communicate.

Shubigi’s stance is clear: There is no one right viewpoint out there, a message she hopes visitors to the exhibition or readers of her book will take away. “I hope they see that it is important to not replace the plurality of human experience with a singular narrative or ideology. I want people to see that there’s a massive world that exists outside of our largely single perspectives and to think beyond the convenient fictions that we’ve been taught and those we tell ourselves.”

This story was published in the Jun-Aug 2022 issue of HEY!. To read it and other stories from this issue in print, click here.