Rohini Devasher’s “One Hundred Thousand Suns”
By MEERA MENEZES
ROHINI DEVASHER’s One Hundred Thousand Suns, 2023, four-channel synced video installation, UHD, color, 5.1 sound, 25 min. Courtesy Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai.
Rohini Devasher
One Hundred Thousand Suns
Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum
Mumbai
Nov 12–Dec 20
Indian artist Rohini Devasher is an avid stargazer and eclipse chaser. With a multimedia practice reflecting her abiding interest in the intersection of art, science, and philosophy, Devasher often collaborates with astronomers, researchers, and scientific institutions. Her solo exhibition “One Hundred Thousand Suns,” curated by Tasneem Zakaria Mehta at the Special Project Space of Mumbai’s Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, presented an extensive series of her copper drawings alongside the titular work—her first ever synced four-channel video installation. The title alludes to the 157,000 images of the sun captured over more than a century by staff at the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory in southern India, one of only two observatories in the world with over 120 years of continuous data on the sun.
Devasher’s research-driven approach was lauded when she was named Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year 2024, and while conceptualizing One Hundred Thousand Suns she pondered how she could represent the sun in all its complexity. From the archives of the Kodaikanal Observatory, she began collecting a variety of material, including hand-drawn sunspots on glass photographic plates and small disks of paper, as well as H-alpha and Calcium K images. In the film, the artist combined images of this material with her own personal documentation such as photographs, drawings, videos, and interviews with fellow eclipse chasers. These observations were brought together with images and data from NASA’s public domain.
Installation view of ROHINI DEVASHER’s One Hundred Thousand Suns, 2023, four-channel synced video installation, UHD, color, 5.1 sound, 25 min, at Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, 2024. Courtesy Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum.
ROHINI DEVASHER’s One Hundred Thousand Suns, 2023, four-channel synced video installation, UHD, color, 5.1 sound, 25 min. Courtesy Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai.
Investigating the sun through four “Paradigms”, Devasher’s video One Hundred Thousand Suns explores the star’s primary dimensions—material, ephemeral, personal, and geographic—across a quartet of screens. “Paradigm 1 – Site” foregrounds optical instruments as well as staff at the Kodaikanal Observatory, some of whom have been observing the sun for four generations. It also sheds light on the colonial history of the quaint 19th-century white-domed observatory, which took over the activities of the Madras Observatory, founded by the British East India Company in 1786. “Paradigm 2 – Sun Drawings” focuses on naked-eye drawings of sunspots created between 1902 and 1904, interrogating the nature of drawing objects that are essentially difficult to capture. “Paradigm 3 – Twin Suns” explores the inherent dichotomy of the sun as both “knowable” and “unknowable” with the help of moments captured by 19th-century glass plate astrophotography. “Paradigm 4 – Eclipse,” a reflection on light and memory, depicts footage of the eclipsed sun caught in the beam of the 60-meter tunnel telescope at the Kodaikanal Observatory, overlaid with voices of eclipse chasers from the interviews she conducted. Sound played a central role in the film to form an acoustic rendering of the star at the center of our solar system. Layering these dimensions together, Devasher’s video proves the inherent complexity of truly “knowing.” With no clear narrative thread, viewers must shift their attention between competing screens while attempting to piece together the visual and acoustic fragments.
ROHINI DEVASHER’s Sol Drawings, 2023, fumage, flame, metal marker, glass marker, acid and gas burner on copper leaf, 15 × 15 cm. Courtesy Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai.
As a counterpoint to the film, an adjacent room in the Special Project Space hosted three series of burnished copper works. Shadow Portraits (2023–24), Sol Drawings (2023), and Skywatch (2023), were mounted on dark walls featuring hand-drawn celestial maps of the night sky. Devasher chose copper to reflect astronomers’ understanding of Earth’s metal as having extraterrestrial origins. Subjecting the copper sheets to acid washing, embossing, and candle smoke, the artist was able to create areas of luminescence and darkness to visually mimic sunspots and other solar phenomena. While Shadow Portraits drew from images taken during eclipse chases, her wafer-thin copperplate Sol Drawings were inspired by nanoparticle motion and astrophotography. The two vertical-format Skywatch drawings depict an analemma: a diagram of the sun’s position seen from a fixed location on Earth at the same time over the course of a year. In these latter drawings, Devasher contrasted the static nature of the image with the movement of time.
The exhibition brought to light the extensive research and material Devasher has gathered over a decade of observing the skies. Her ability to straddle the worlds of science and art, and translate complex data into a deeply personal visual syntax came to the fore in “One Hundred Thousand Suns.” Devasher has described her practice as moving between “the frames of wonder and the strange.” Her unsettling film, coupled with her radiant copper drawings, were ample testimony to this.
Meera Menezes is a Delhi-based art writer and independent curator.
