Can storytelling from the margins result in recollection of a nation’s shared id? When transmitting data, who determines what’s price preserving? What do fossil-fuel extractivism and power provides should do with misplaced archives and books? These are among the many questions that drive artist and author Shubigi Rao‘s first solo exhibition in China: “These Petrified Paths.“

Identified for her ten-year tasks that manifest in movie, books, drawing, images, etchings, and installations with discarded gadgets and archives, Shubigi Rao considers each present-day and historic topics, providing alternate viewpoints on modern displacement—be it of peoples, languages, cultures, or realms of information. Her work gives a poetic, incisive, and humorous critique of the problematic narrative of civilizations and the western data programs that form our existence.

This exhibition on the Rockbund Artwork Museum in Shanghai unfolds in 4 galleries; every refers to a particular time period that echoes recurrently in Rao’s oeuvre: the “subterranean,“ the “sacred area,“ the “margins,“ and the “motion.“ She has created phylogenetic “bushes of information” within the type of a big, three dimensional power pylon, 12 meters in top, punctuating the guts of the exhibition. (The time period phylogenic tree refers to a graphic diagram depicting traces of genetic descent from a standard ancestor.)

Branching throughout the gallery area are traces of transmission, of information, power, story-telling and energy. By highlighting the obscured transmission of information, experiences, and reminiscences, These Petrified Paths is a name to motion to have fun completely different types of data and to study, from the margins, how one can evolve out of destruction, loss, dying, and entropy.

Additionally on the nexus of These Petrified Paths is a newly commissioned feature-length movie of the identical title. Filmed in September 2022 and spring 2023 amidst the outbreak of the battle in Armenia, These Petrified Paths weaves tales and recollections of native communities into an enthralling narrative interlaced with reminiscence, written and spoken phrase, dialogue, terrain, and on a regular basis existence. It poetically delves into Armenia‘s enduring cultural relics, battles, and fragmented literary richness underneath duress. As Armenia grapples with the aftermath of battle, custodians of literature unveil extra than simply books, with ladies rising as conservators of libraries and chroniclers of pivotal moments. In time of disaster, these delicate tales reveal the customarily behind-the-scenes but monumental efforts of restoration specialists, guides, translators, archivists, and advocates.

at Rockbund Artwork Museum, Shanghai
till February 25, 2024