Rohini Devasher (*1978, New Delhi) is the Deutsche Bank, “Artist of the Year” 2024. Borrowed Light, her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe refers to light, which plays a central role in astronomy as well as a recognition of the entanglement of relationships in the natural world, between the human and non-human, nature and culture.
Devasher has been an amateur astronomer for as long as she has been an artist. She collaborates with international scientific institutions as well as with amateur and professional astronomers. Her artistic practice lies at the intersection of science, art, and philosophy. It includes the media of video, painting, printmaking, drawing, and installation.
One Hundred Thousand Suns (2023), the centerpiece of the show, is a 4-channel video that references the archive of more than 100,000 images of the Sun taken over the course of a century at the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory in India. It traces the evolution of solar observation, from early hand-drawn sunspots on paper, through glass plate photography and data sets from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center as well as the artist’s own data collections.
