"There’s a famous line from Heinrich Heine’s otherwise not particularly well known 1823 play Almansor: A Tragedy that goes, ‘Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings’. We all know what happened in Berlin 110 years later (the Jewish poet’s works were particularly abhorred by the Nazis), and then even later, during the Second World War. Heine’s chilling observation – that cultural censorship inevitably leads to actual genocide – is more complex in reality, as the relationship between the different forms of violence can be blurred and indistinct. But his line of thought has been generative for Shubigi Rao. The India-born, Singapore-based artist has made it her mission to trace a history of book burning, destruction and banishment, with the broader goal of exploring the cruelties human beings inflict on each other."