ARTISTS

In A Small Study of Silence, Shubigi Rao considers the loss of human and more-than-human ecosystems. Filmed across seven years and four countries, in libraries and natural habitats alike, the video weaves together a range of climates and archival materials. Certain motifs emerge, namely the relation of humans with the natural environment, the imperial archive, and histories of language. At one point, Rao’s camera lingers on a page of scientific photographs that capture a bird in various moments of flight. She then presents the same bird’s movements as they appear illustrated by an Indigenous artist in a colonial volume. In this way, the work connects to Rao’s longstanding interest in the collisions between violence and survival and how these terms play out across the fields of ecology, literature, and history.