‘BIENNALES ARE LIKE FLOATING CITIES’

The Indian-born Singapore-based artist Shubigi Rao, 43, recently announced as the curator of the fifth edition of the Kochi-muziris Biennale (KMB), is no stranger to sprawling, long-term projects, multiple media, or expansive timelines. But even so, 18 months seems like barely enough to define a theme, commission scores of artworks, and organise the spaces that will host the next edition of India’s only three-month exhibition of contemporary art, which is slated to open in December 2020.

Her current project, she admits, laughing, has been a decade in the making. Called Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, it is a film, book and visual art project on the history of book destruction.

Rao is a polymath whose primary occupation is that of visual artist. She is also a writer and theorist whose works deal with the study of languages, libraries and archives, as well as subjects such as archaeology, neuroscience and natural history. She has an uncanny knack for finding the connections between these varied fields, which results in complex and layered installations.

At the last edition of the biennale, Rao created a piece titled The Pelagic Tracts, a

work that charts the lost history of the book smugglers of Kochi right up to the post-floods devastation of 2018. For this project, she spent weeks researching the libraries, boatyards, pulping stations and scrapyards of the little port town.

The 2018-19 biennale, incidentally, was the one that ran into controversy over alleged non-payments by the organisers, to contractors. “It is in the process of being resolved,” says Bose Krishnamachari, president of the Kochi Biennale Foundation.

On the choice of curator this time – previous curators have included Jitish Kallat, Sudarshan Shetty and Anita Dube – Krishnamachari added that it was in keeping with the tradition of having an artist at the helm. “Shubigi Rao is not just an artist; she’s also a theorist and writer. Her range is vast and she has a liberal way of looking at art with commitment as well as research,” says Krishnamachari. “There is a freshness to her approach, which we all agreed would make her the right person for the job.”

Excerpts from the interview with Rao: Biennales are sometimes floating cities that are unmoored from their locality or regionality. The Kochi-muziris Biennale