The Yellow Scarf

2019 - Installation (Installation)
Video: 20:24 minutes, Prints: 100 x 70 cm each

Named after a book that artist Shubigi Rao read growing up, The Yellow Scarf explores the history of the Thuggee cult in India in relation to the colonial British administration that ‘discovered’ but also ultimately exterminated this cult of assassins. The modern term ‘thug’ is said to be derived from Thuggee. Rao’s fascination with the Thuggee is interwoven with her parallel research into the strangler tree, found throughout South and Southeast Asia. While the Thuggee assassins were a cult of Kali (the Hindu goddess of death, time, and often associated with sexuality and violence) worshipping bandits who often killed through strangling, the strangler tree is similarly known for its adaptive ability to grow around and to ‘strangle’ other trees. Presented as part of the installation are two prints that recall the elaborate ‘family trees’ that the British Administrator Sir Henry William Sleeman laid out to map and capture members of the cult. The prints functioned as guide maps, of sorts, to the taxonomy of knowledge and hierarchies of thought, and how this went hand-in-hand with a diminishing of indigenous (and later colonised) fields of knowledge. Evocative of a dense textual forest, the work (video and prints) places the viewer in an entangled history of conquest, governance, and both the literal and figural trees of knowledge. The Yellow Scarf is not just about the markers of monstrosity that are used to police a society, but is also the historical cultivation of society’s enduring fear of the forest and those that emerge out of it’s darkness. The Yellow Scarf continues Rao’s study of the horrors that have defined human history through a specific facet of systematic destruction. In her other works, Rao described the destruction of books as a manageable way to look at the horrors that man can inflict upon himself and the world. The Yellow Scarf provides a focused lens on the construction, management, and infliction of horror as part of a lesser-known history of colonial governance that has been written and rewritten over through films and popular culture. Despite these generations of re-writing, the past continues to haunt the present through resilient myths such as that associated with the strangler tree.

Shubigi Rao interrogates how we know what we do and how we remember what we do. Her multifaceted installations are a cybernetic foray across archaeology, neuroscience, anthropology and etymology. Sometimes absurd such as building immortal jellyfish, and at other times serious, such as an attempt to produce an encyclopaedia, her artworks are visual and physical representations that point at the complex and inherited systems that govern and define our lives. Since 2014 she has been developing the project Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book , a decade-long film, book and visual art project about the history of book destruction.

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