The Material and the Temporal: Rohini Devasher’s One Hundred Thousand Suns
Currently on view at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Rohini Devasher’s solo exhibition One Hundred Thousand Suns is an ode to our nearest star in the solar system, the sun. Centred around Devasher’s four-channel immersive installation, which lends the exhibition its name, this audio-visual project tells the story of the sun and the people who dedicate their lives to the tradition of watching the sky. The showcase also features a set of new works: embellished copper sheets and site-specific drawings inspired by the sun’s movement across space. While these help signify Devasher’s interdisciplinary interests, it is the compelling nature of the immersive installation that remains the main focus.
Looking at four interconnected narratives, One Hundred Thousand Suns documents Devasher’s research within the field of observational astronomy. It evokes both gloom and glory, leaving one feeling nostalgic for the annual school trip to the science planetarium while lamenting the limited attention these spaces receive today. Devasher collates publicly available images of the solar system gathered from NASA, intersperses these with her own etchings and photographs of total eclipses she witnessed, and strings everything together with archival material and interviews conducted with the staff at the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory (KoSO). At KoSO, which has been at the forefront of celestial observations in India for about 125 years, a photographic plate of the sun has been made religiously every day since 1901. This has resulted in nearly 1,57,000 original portraits of the sun, which help researchers study the minute facets of its changes.
If this is an exhibition that broadens one’s horizons towards the interconnected relationship between science and the humanities, it is also about the central role of archives in furthering research. Devasher, through the interviews she has conducted for this project, highlights how archival documentation is crucial to the “transgenerational project” of observing celestial bodies. Documentary-style footage of Devasher’s visits to Kodaikanal and the now-defunct Madras Observatory point to the community-oriented nature of research when it comes to astronomy. The photographs taken are not just a resource that helps current researchers continue their work, but they are also a serious endeavour towards building archives for the future. This kind of forward-looking perspective would be highly useful in several other domains, especially as institutional apathy looms large over research as a rigorous practice in the country.
For Devasher, whose practice is at the intersection of art, science and philosophy, astronomy has been something she has researched for over a decade. While she continues to experiment with a variety of materials and mediums in looking at the natural sciences, her interest in the realm of observational astronomy led her to making a set of audio-based works under Reading into the Stars in 2013. Since then, she has looked at eclectic ways in which scientific research can be presented in new and fascinating ways for audiences—photographs of cloud-covered skies, video footage shot at observatories, scientific drawings and publicly available images of space, amongst other experimental approaches.
In One Hundred Thousand Suns, she takes her interest in probing the personal to a different level with her focus on not just collecting stories but also scientific data that looks at the serious business of solar eclipses. One walks away from the black box feeling an immense appreciation for the community of umbraphiles who have kept up their commitment to a very important tradition. And it is always such a niche focus on keeping alive certain facets of discipline that lets one see beauty in the world, even if for the minutest of seconds.
To learn more about artists working with astronomical images and themes, revisit Najrin Islam’s conversation with photographer Ajay Talwar on photographing the night sky, Arundhati Chauhan’s conversation with Mónica Alcázar-Duarte about her video Ikamo Tlalli – Earthless (2021) at Photo Kathmandu and Annalisa Mansukhani’s reflections on Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010).
All images are from One Hundred Thousand Suns (2024) by Rohini Devasher. Images courtesy of Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum and the artist.
