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When mischief turns into art

Shubigi Rao loves to play pranks. Writing fake art history books under a male archaeologist's pseudonym or setting up an installation that shows how contemporary art deranges its viewers are all par for the course, finds out Ornella D'Souza

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Creating phantasmagorical artworks laced with wit is perhaps an excuse for Singapore-based visual artist and writer Shubigi Rao to immerse herself in a new discipline. In a career spanning more than a decade, the 42-year-old has devoured a medley of subjects that many would consider impossible to master: logistics, migration, political and military history, film-making, video editing, photography, neuroscience, natural sciences, archaeology, building machines and board games, book binding and chromatography. So it's not surprising then that the petite polymath talks incessantly at breakneck speed on any topic. "I also love reading useless information for my own edification," says the part-time lecturer in Art Theory and MFA Dissertation supervisor for the Faculty of Fine Arts at Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore. "Nobody reads a book or looks at a picture in the same way and so I'd rather let people enter my work from different points," says Rao, whose inky rendition of the octopus from Victor Hugo's 'Toilers of the Sea' brought alive the unkempt Phule museum at the Pune Biennale in January this year.

Here's a gist of her multi-layered works that use humour to convert her fury at absurd, totalitarian ideas and cultural genocide into literary irony:

The Retrospectacle of S Raoul (2003-13)

Sporting short hair and a paper moustache, Rao began her art career masquerading as a biographer to 'S Raoul', a fictitious scientist, theorist and archaeologist, and produced a couple of fake art history books and artworks under the pseudonym. S Raoul's academic credentials were never questioned, perhaps because he was a man. "But as a female, I'm still questioned about the validity of my position. When can we take women's voices seriously?"

The Study of Leftovers (2003-04)

Shocked at Singapore's disposable culture, S Raoul studied archaeology, wrote a fake paper and reconstructed an 'extinct' Singapore from the garbage swept ashore. Every found object, whose origin and provenance was the beach, blended the organic and inorganic. "I found a rusty metal can with roots, coral, barnacles and 4-5 other life forms and plastic, in a beautiful artistic reconstruction by sea creatures." The archaeologist's paper concluded that the umpteen bottle caps and coke cans were deities of the ancient people, and the Styrofoam cup noodles, their staple food.

The Tuning Fork of the Mind (2008)

Days before the Singapore Biennale in 2008, the country's media dissed contemporary art as ugly, offensive and unnecessarily controversial. One newspaper wrote, "There's been no beautiful art since Michelangelo's David."

A fuming Rao read up on neuroscience, wrote a thesis and built a machine that proved contemporary art is dangerous. In one month. The machine had electrodes to measure how contemporary artworks on display at the biennale had left viewers mentally deranged. At the press of a switch, bulbs flashed and dials shook to convert the dsyfunctionalities of the brain into sounds of toilet flushing, dogs barking and crickets singing. Forty-five minutes before the opening, a bomb squad took apart the machine. "They thought it was a bomb," exclaimed Rao, who managed to reinstall it. At a human brain mapping conference, a Nobel prize winning neuroscientist mistook the rusty crochet hooks in the machine to be 19th-century lobotomy tools. "Someone else actually caught his head saying, 'I'm sick'. Many laughed but took it at face value," recounts the artist, poker faced.

Confetti: Litter from a Fascist Parade (2009)

In another prank to depict the futile attempts of women writers, especially those of colour, who were never published, Rao transferred a manuscript on a white wall, by individually hand-rubbing tiny white vinyl stickers. "The five days of labour were about the futility of unread work – the invisible manuscript that no one could read," says Rao, drawing a parallel with the unpublished writers' circumstances.

PULP: Short Biography of the Banished Book (2013-23)

The 10-year project is born from the view that one's culture is superior than another's. It involves releasing five volumes, one every two years, on Rao's travels to research, locate and film people connected to libraries and archives that were burned down with their rare manuscripts. Rao last visited Croatia and Bosnia to expose the 1990s siege of Sarajevo and interviewed a fire fighter, who tried to save some books, but was unable to.

"Sarajevo was 30 years ago. We've already forgotten that lesson," says Rao and points out that knowledge is controlled by a few. "Not everyone can afford to pay $80 to read an American research thesis. So they rely on online shadow libraries."

Rao conducts every interview one-on-one while handling the lights and the camera. "Seeing how emotionally invested I am, (sometimes even confess to destroying stuff), show valuable materials and manuscripts, tell these incredible stories. They can see that this isn't just an art project."

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