Outside Location /
Minnesota Street Project Foundation – 1201 Minnesota Street
The Minnesota Street Project Foundation (MSP Foundation), in collaboration with Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to present One Hundred Thousand Suns, Delhi-based artist Rohini Devasher’s first U.S. solo exhibition, January 16–March 24, 2024 at 1201 Minnesota Street. 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.
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 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 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 subatomic to the atmospheric, Latent Fields is A coalescence of material, visibility, scale, and temporality.
One Hundred Thousand Suns is free and open to the public.
Minnesota Street Project Foundation
1201 Minnesota Street, San Francisco
Hours of Operation: Wednesday & Thursday: 3:00–7:00 pm; Friday & Saturday: 12:00–7:00 pm
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
Observing the Unknown: Rohini Devasher and Kim Beil in Conversation
Friday, January 19, 5:30 pm
Minnesota Street Project Foundation
1201 Minnesota Street
RSVP HERE
The Minnesota Street Project Foundation and Gallery Wendi Norris are delighted to present Observing the Unknown: Rohini Devasher and Kim Beil in Conversation. Delhi-based artist Rohini Devasher and Stanford art history professor Kim Beil will discuss their shared interests in the intersections of art and astronomy. This conversation is part of the programming for One Hundred Thousand Suns, Devasher’s first solo institutional exhibition in the U.S.
Kim Beil teaches art history at Stanford University and her writing appears in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Believer, and Cabinet, as well as many art magazines. Her book Anonymous Objects: Inscrutable Photographs and the Unknown will be released this winter by SBPH and MACK books.
Rohini Devasher (b. 1978, New Delhi, India) works with video, painting, printmaking, drawing, installation, and other mediums, to map the complexities of ecology, cosmology, and technology viewed through the twin lenses of wonder and the strange. The theoretical grounding of her work draws from the history of science, philosophy, speculative fiction, and eco-horror. Devasher holds a BFA in painting from New Delhi’s College of Art and an MFA in printmaking from the Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton in the UK. She is co-represented by Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco, California, and Project 88 in Mumbai, India.
This event is free and open to the public; register in advance to secure a spot HERE.
One Hundred Thousand Suns and Latent Fields is presented by the Minnesota Street Project Foundation in collaboration with Gallery Wendi Norris.
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.