Multimedia Indian artist Rohini Devasher is Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year” 2024 for her pioneering work at the intersection of art, science and philosophy. Nominated by Stephanie Rosenthal, Director of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project, Devasher is the 15^th recipient of the award, which recognises promising artists’ contributions to works on paper and photography. The award includes a solo exhibition and publication in Germany by year-end.

Devasher spoke to STIR about her ongoing solo exhibitions at the Minnesota Street Project Foundation and Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco. We delved into her 2023 residency at CERN and her profound interest in astronomical research communities, knowledge systems, history and theories of seeing.

Deeksha Nath: Could you take us through the research that informed your ongoing exhibitions in North America with the ambitious four-channel video installation One Hundred Thousand Suns (2023)?

Rohini Devasher: This is my first synced four-channel work, with its choreography across screens crafting an immersive auditory, visual and textual experience.

The research for the work is bookended by two solar eclipses—the first in 2009 began the research around astronomy when I received the Sarai ‘City as a Studio’ Associate Fellowship and the second in December 2019 which led to this body of research being collected at the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory (KSO) in South India as part of the Goethe Institut’s programme Five Million Incidents (2019-2020) catalysed by Raqs Media Collective.

The observatory at Kodaikanal is extraordinary. Every day, weather permitting, since 1904, the staff have recorded images of our Sun amounting to over 100 years of solar data, during 11 solar cycles and more than 1,57,000 distinct portraits of our nearest star. These observations range from hand-drawn sun spots on small disks of paper and glass photographic plates to H-alpha and Calcium K images. Each of these tens of thousands of Suns are archetypes in a sense. Each [is] a conjunction of direct observation and experience on one hand; and information and data on the other. The installation, developed from KSO archives; my own data, video, interviews and images collected during past eclipse chases and the solar data that NASA’s Scientific Visualisation Studio and the Solar Dynamics Observatory Science have been made available in the public domain.

The work consists of four ‘paradigms,’ each exploring a different sun dimension through digital channels showing simultaneously over four large screens. Sound is a central protagonist. Each paradigm within One Hundred Thousand Suns is also a specific acoustic rendering of the Sun, using data, voice, music and sound.

Deeksha: I’m intrigued by the term ‘paradigm’ that you use to refer to these individual parts of the work. When one talks about data, one is talking about the ethics of data collection and data protection but it is also collected within certain parameters, ‘paradigms’ for it to be in some way scientific. Can you elaborate?

Rohini: In 2020, I was invited by the Open Data Institute (ODI) in London to be their online embedded artist-in-residence for their Data as Culture programme. As an artist and an amateur astronomer, much of my work looks at the role of ‘observation’ and the ‘field’ or ‘site’. I have never thought of myself as working with ‘data’. I work with observations, both my own and those of others and I work with material of many kinds but the word ‘data’ was never really used. Over the course of the residency, I interviewed people at the ODI who work closely with data and they described it as being playful, a mirror, data as being deeply human and not this objective other, which can be a dangerous fallacy.

I was introduced to the idea of the ‘digital twin’ during the ODI residency, which is a virtual representation that serves as the real-time digital counterpart of a physical object or process. However, there are companies today trying to create digital twins of the Earth. On a planetary scale, digital twinning begins with the assumption that the Earth is essentially knowable. That you could somehow model all its complexity and entanglements digitally without bias. This for me was both fascinating and problematic.

It felt important for me not to create an analogue twin of the Sun but rather a speculative, metaphoric, deliberately discrete assemblage of ways in which we have recorded and observed the Sun. I want to push against the idea of data as seemingly detached, disinterested or neutral. And foreground that data is collaborative, collective, human and crucially data is material.

There is a script that runs through the work that takes the shape of voice, subtitle, text etc. but is not linear in its structure, it is simultaneous. You are meant to travel between the paradigms which annotate each other. The paradigm is a frame, a way in which we think about the materiality of recordings of the Sun. Paradigm 1 - Site features the instruments and people at the historic KSO, some of whom have been observing the Sun for four generations. It also looks at the complex history of the Observatory, which, when it was established in 1899, took over the activities of the Madras Observatory founded by the British East India Company in 1786. Paradigm 2 - Sun Drawings explores observations over time using naked-eye drawings of sunspots created between 1902 and 1904. It questions the nature of drawing when faced with an object that is not only unfamiliar but in most cases, difficult to understand, see and draw. While Paradigm 3 - Twin Suns considers the Sun as knowable and unknowable. It focuses on the collections of lost, never-to-be-repeated moments, captured using 19^th century glass plate astrophotography.

The fourth paradigm - Eclipse offers a meditation on light and memory. Footage of the eclipsed Sun caught in the beam of the 60-metre tunnel telescope at the KSO is layered with the voices of eclipse chasers. One Hundred Thousand Suns brings us the Sun observed by hand, pencil, light, photographic emulsion, glass, dark room, paper, voice and memory.

Deeksha: The nature of pursuit is held within the identity of an eclipse chaser, despite an eclipse being a timed event that happens on a certain date. How does this pursuit inform your practice in the search for a certain type of knowledge?

Rohini: I have chased four eclipses but I have yet to ‘see’ a total solar eclipse because the one total solar eclipse I went to observe in 2009 was clouded out. So, I would say I am an amateur astronomer and eclipse chasing is one of the things I do. But the voices of the people in the fourth paradigm are experienced eclipse chasers. One of the voices, Glenn Schneider (Astronomer at Steward Observatory in Tucson, Arizona), whom I interviewed at the eclipse chasers conference in New Delhi in 2012, has spent over an hour observing eclipses in totality (the period the moon completely covers the sun). If we think of each eclipse being between one to four minutes at the most, it gives us an idea of how many eclipses he has observed and how far he has travelled ‘to get back under the Moon's shadow’, as he says in the work.

Deeksha: At KSO, with longevity to the observations, they make scientific discoveries but from an artistic point of view, we are intrigued by how this act of observation and drawing has transferred to knowledge creation and the pathways it forges. I recently saw your work Terrasphere (2015) at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in New Delhi and my first reaction was bewilderment, trying to make sense of what I was looking at. And it is this lack of ‘knowing what one is seeing’ that seems present in Latent Fields, suspended panels on view alongside the film. Because the sun is filtered multiple times by the time one experiences it in your work. Can you tell us more about it?

Rohini: Terrasphere is about my fascination with world-building, terrariums and self-contained ecosystems. It is a video sculpture, which seems to hold a living, breathing, atmosphere-generating terrarium, which, of course, is an illusion and entirely constructed so it is exactly what you experienced. In the current body of work, I want to make and hold space for the multiplicity of voices and for them to frame my learning and experiences.

Latent Fields, a set of seven digitally printed silk tapestries were made as a counterpoint to One Hundred Thousand Suns. They were made in response to the invitation by Wendi Norris, the Director of Gallery Wendi Norris and Rachel Sample at the Minnesota Street Project Foundation to activate the large expanse of space which MSPF offers. I loved the challenge that the epic expanse of space offered. So I played with scale and the idea of distance.

In the archives at CERN, there are photographs taken of the early experiments in particle physics in the now-retired bubble chambers. Photographic emulsions are still used in some parts of the detectors. In the emulsion developing lab, they still stack the photographs as we are used to seeing, on racks using clips. I brought this idea of stacking to the 17000 sq. ft of space where Latent Fields are displayed. A crossing through the body of a star: from the sub-atomic to the atmospheric, from the centre of a sun to the outer edges of the galaxy, Latent Fields is a coalescence of material, visibility, scale and temporality. Navigating the work was a play on the idea of navigating deep space. Each printed image is a digital collage of scan on copper, drawings on copper, embossing, acid, burning, and scratching. 

Copper is an incredible substance. Born in the hearts of stars it also mimics the colour of the sun. The works at the Gallery Wendi Norris, Shadow Portraits, are fumage (smoke) works on copper sheets. I am thrilled with the way they turned out and I am experimenting with scale now for my upcoming solo in Mumbai at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum.

Deeksha: You talk of the importance of amateur astronomical communities. I am curious about your residency at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) in Bengaluru and CERN in Geneva and the time you spent with the scientific community. It mimics the art community in the way that speaks within itself and opens up to the public with its innovations and revelations, with its spectacles but with a language, not all understand. Can you tell us more about those experiences?

Rohini: Elisa Storelli and my residency at both CERN and ICTS just this past summer is still very fresh and the research is still being processed and sifted but that is sort of the point of this amazing open-ended residency.

I wanted to explore the role of the observer and observation in quantum and fundamental physics through the frames of wonder and the strange. My process was to begin, as always, with diverse conversations. The incredible thing about both ICTS and CERN is the range of research we were able to access from pure scientific thinking in statistical and condensed matter physics, complex systems and fluid dynamics, gravitational wave astronomy, string theory and so on at ICTS. At CERN we met with experimental and theoretical physicists working on various experiments like ATLAS, LHC, ALICE, the Antimatter Matter Factory, CLOUD, Proto Dune etc.

At both places, I gave a lecture and while ICTS was about my past work, at CERN I decided to offer a proposition of a model that might frame my work. I do think my work sits between the wonder and the strange, especially the video feedback works like Hopeful Monsters (2018).

The Standard Model is a model in particle physics and this is me re-writing that model, being deliberately tongue in cheek. The new model allows connections and patterns to be read across and between points and frames. All points and frames are in superposition, constantly in play and have the potential to influence the other. So, links can be drawn that offer multiple modes through which to order information and experiences and propose a way for me to look at research both outside and within my practice.  

'One Hundred Thousand Suns' is currently on view at the Minnesota Street Project Foundation in San Francisco North America, at the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht Netherlands as part of the show, 'The Creation of Science' and the Kunsthalle Bern as part of ‘Punya 2.0’ and will travel to the Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai, India in the latter half of the year.