Rohini Devasher

Minnesota Street Project Foundation | 1201 Minnesota Street, San Francisco

Rohini Devasher
One Hundred Thousand Suns
January 16–March 24, 2023

Gallery Wendi Norris, in collaboration with The Minnesota Street Project Foundation (MSP Foundation), is pleased to announce One Hundred Thousand Suns, Delhi-based artist Rohini Devasher’s first U.S. solo exhibition. Her captivating and research-driven body of work chronicles a decade as an eclipse chaser and amateur astronomer. The focal point of the exhibition, the four-channel, 20-minute One Hundred Thousand Suns film will debut simultaneously in three continents: at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai, India in collaboration with Project 88; at Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht, Netherlands; and at MSP Foundation in San Francisco, California. The San Francisco debut of One Hundred Thousand Suns at MSP Foundation will be accompanied by the immersive, site-specific installation Latent Fields. As a counterpoint to this cinematic presentation, Gallery Wendi Norris will concurrently host an intimate show of Devasher’s two-dimensional works on copper at its San Francisco-based headquarters.

“Providing a new platform for artists from around the world is an active ethos of the Minnesota Street Project Foundation,” Rachel Sample, Director, Minnesota Street Project Foundation. “Each subsequent exhibition at 1201 Minnesota Street has expanded the geographic scope of artistic voices, and Devashar’s One Hundred Thousand Suns is the perfect next stop on our international journey.”

Within MSP Foundation’s state-of-the-art screening gallery, Devasher’s One Hundred Thousand Suns film explores four distinct dimensions of the Sun: material, ephemeral, personal, and historical. 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 examines the complexities of observational astronomy and the ways in which ‘seeing’ is strange, wondrous, and more ambiguous than one might imagine.

Suspended from MSP Foundation’s towering vaulted ceiling, Devasher’s installation Latent Fields envelops visitors with expansive digitally-printed fabrics on which the subatomic and the stellar collide. Devasher prints images and drawings of fast-charged particles and distant celestial bodies imbuing their silk material with the mesmerizing sheen of copper. A crossing through the body of a star: from the sub atomic to the atmospheric, Latent Fields is a coalescence of material, visibility, scale, and temporality.

An exhibition at the Gallery Wendi Norris headquarters will focus on Devasher’s Sol Drawings, a series of embellished copper sheets. Once forged in massive stars, the Earth inherited copper from the universe more than four billion years ago. Transformed through interventions like fumage, acid wash, and embossment, these intricate and luminous panels invite close-looking and contemplation.

One Hundred Thousand Suns is free and open to the public.

Gallery Wendi Norris Hours of Operation:

Tuesday – Saturday: 11:00 am–6:00 pm

MSP Foundation Hours of Operation:

Wednesday–Thursday: 3:00 pm–7:00 pm
Friday – Saturday: 12:00–7:00 pm

One Hundred Thousand Suns was commissioned by Data as Culture at the Open Data Institute (ODI) as part of an Evidence & Foresight online artists’ residency 2021-22. Part of the research for this piece was made possible as part of Five Million Incidents, 2019-2020 supported by Goethe Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi, in collaboration with Raqs Media Collective.

Museum Catherijneconvent in Utrecht, Netherlands will debut Devasher’s One Hundred Thousand Suns within the exhibition The Genesis of Science, on view from February 21 through June 2, 2024.