Words, they are slippery things. And don’t get me started on the sounds they make! (Wait, do words even make sounds? Or do sounds make words?). Phonetics or Phonology? Or both! Anyway, some sounds seem to appear out of nowhere when certain words are pronounced. Listen to that linking or intrusive ‘r’. (Hold Me Farst!). […]
“2012 is the year of Etel Adnan” – Hans Ulrich Obrist at Art Dubai, March 2012 But what of 2011? Or 2021, the year of Etel Adnan’s death. What is a year anyway? Adnan died a few days ago, on Sunday November 14th, so what do the years even mean within the posthumous dates of […]
Pessoa – you know the one, right? – isn’t here on these shelves, but his words are still here with me: To be great, be whole: don’t exaggerate Or leave out any part of you. Be complete in each thing. Put all you are Into the least of your acts. So too in each lake, […]
Libraries constantly shed… – Shubigi Rao ‘Articulating the Archive: An Imprecise Index’, in Zoe Butt (ed.) ‘Journey Beyond the Arrow’, Sharjah Art Foundation: Sharjah, 2019, -. 238. Zoe Butt Shubigi Rao Léuli Eshrāghi Phan Thảo Nguyên Mark Salvatus Lantian Xie Adriana Bustos Kidlat Tahimik Lisa Reihana Gudskul
It was fragile, and in need of conservation, but it was tougher than it looked – the book had been buried in the 1990s to save it from the destruction and depredation that was gutting libraries and archives during the Siege of Sarajevo, and had only recently been exhumed from the earth. – Shubigi Rao […]
This is a futile chronicle, but at the very least, I hope to point to that body, that corpus, that library, the book as collective humanity. – Shubigi Rao ‘Afterword’ from ‘Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, Volume 1 of V’, Rock Paper Fire, Singapore, 2016, p. IV
A voice (not mine) says something like: Borders open to an endless moment It sounds as if the voice is speaking in a large auditorium. The accent is American, although it is hard to pinpoint what region. There was once a recording of this voice, but now it is lost. It makes him think about […]
A common thread in these two works [STAGED?, 2016, and STAGING, 2017] and my previous live installations is the very strict script that the dancers follow, which is transcribed on paper, describing each movement and their counts – we call it the Bible. The original material for the diptych is a two-hour solo, which I […]
Notes on my white librarian’s Whiteness: When I was a alive my shelves were brimming with the canonical texts of a white-washed version of the ancient Mediterranean cultures of Greece and Rome. I can still feel within me the litany of white male editors’ names on the spines of those rows of green (Greek) and […]
Joining filmmaker and writer John Waters and art historian Miwon Kwon as blurb writers for the back of the 2008 book Long Life Cool White: Photographs & Essays by Moyra Davey, introduced by Helen Molesworth and which my librarian received as a generous gift from the artist and writer, Moyra Davey herself, choreographer and filmmaker […]