Exhibition Opening - Rohini Devasher: One Hundred Thousand Suns (San Francisco)

Rohini Devasher: One Hundred Thousand Suns
Gallery Wendi Norris – Jan 16 to Mar 24, 2024 San Francisco (US)

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.

Four distinct dimensions of the Sun.

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.