The Dr Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum is pleased to announce One Hundred Thousand Suns, the debut screening of Rohini Devasher’s compelling and immersive four channel video installation in India, curated by Tasneem Zakaria Mehta at the Special Project Space, Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum. Conceived in collaboration with Project 88, this solo exhibition also features Devasher’s Sol Drawings, Shadow Portraits and Skywatch, a series of embellished copper works, adorned with markings inspired by solar phenomena. Deutsche Bank’s ‘Artist of the Year’ for 2024, Rohini Devasher’s rigorous and research-driven body of work chronicles a decade of her practice as an eclipse chaser and amateur astronomer, as she delves into the intersections of science, art, and philosophy. For Devasher, the key to exploring new cosmologies between the human and the non-human lies in examining the interplay between place, observer, and observation.
The focal point of this exhibition, Devasher’s One Hundred Thousand Suns explores four distinct dimensions of the Sun: material, ephemeral, personal, and geographic. Driven by more than 157,000 portraits of our nearest star, observed over 120 years, this audio visual work centers on the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory in India, where every day since 1901 staff have recorded images of the Sun. Through the observatory’s archival material, combined with public domain images from NASA and the artist’s own data – photographs, drawings, videos, and interviews with eclipse chasers – Devasher explores the complexities of observational astronomy and the ways in which ‘seeing’ is strange, wondrous, and more ambiguous than one might imagine.
This screening marks the culmination of the transcontinental debut of One Hundred Thousand Suns; Devasher’s film was previously exhibited at The Minnesota Street Project Foundation (MSP) in San Francisco, California, and at Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht, Netherlands, the Kunsthalle Bern and subsequently at the PalaisPopulaire, Berlin. The exhibition will also focus on a new series of works on copper, a metal forged in the hearts of massive stars, which catapulted onto our planet more than four billion years ago. Shadow Portraits are intimate portraits of eclipses past and those yet to come, rendered in copper and fumage or the impressions made by candle smoke. Inspired by images of sunspots and other solar phenomena, Sol Drawings translate these observations more closely and deeply. While the two Skywatch pieces are drawings of a solar analemma on copper that explore the duality between the stillness of the image and the movement of time. Transformed through interventions like fumage, acid wash, and embossment, these intricate and luminous panels invite close-looking and contemplation.
