BERLIN.- Rohini Devasher (*1978, New Delhi) is Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year” 2024. To mark this award, the PalaisPopulaire in Berlin is presenting the Indian artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe from September 12, 2024, to March 10, 2025 under the title Borrowed Light.

Since 2010, Deutsche Bank has honored an artist each year, thus providing a platform for new positions in contemporary art. Rohini Devasher was nominated by Stephanie Rosenthal, Director of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project, who was head of the Berlin based Gropius Bau until 2022. “Rohini Devasher uses a research-based approach to create complex narratives that address the urgencies of our daily lives,” says Rosenthal.


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The title of the exhibition, Borrowed Light, refers to light, which plays a central role in astronomy. At the same time, it is an architectural term for light that is reflected or “borrowed” from an adjoining space to illuminate an otherwise dark room or passageway. For Devasher, Borrowed Light is a meditation on impermanence, light, and time.

The exhibition was curated by Britta Färber, Global Head of Art & Culture at Deutsche Bank. “Rohini Devasher’s work quite literally leaves us in cosmic amazement,” says Färber. “Meticulously researched yet deeply poetic, it directs our gaze to the starry sky, then back to ourselves, opening up new perspectives for contemplating solidarity and togetherness on our planet.”

Devasher has been an amateur astronomer as long as she has been an artist. Borrowed Light, like all her projects, is a recognition of the entanglement of relationships in the natural world, between the human and non-human, nature and culture. She collaborates with international scientific institutions as well as with amateurs and professional astronomers. Devasher’s artistic practice lies at the intersection of science, art, and philosophy and includes the media of video, painting, printmaking, drawing, and installation.

The video installation One Hundred Thousand Suns (2023) forms the centerpiece of the show. The 4-channel video 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. The work follows the 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 and the artist’s own data collections. Devasher illustrates that the act of “seeing” is far more complex than we might assume.

Devasher’s video installations engage with numerous worlds and cosmologies. For instance, the video work Terrasphere (2015) resembles a miniature world encapsulated under a dome, exploring the concept of biospheres and self-sustaining ecosystems. But this world is composed of 59 overlapping still images, each a composite of many layers of photographs and drawings, both from the artist’s collection of images taken on visits to botanical gardens, nurseries, and parks, and images sourced from the public domain. Other series, such as the cyanotypes of Mirrored Sky (2017) and the mixed media works of Borrowed Light (2024), can be interpreted as poetic cartographies of celestial light and stars.

Rohini Devasher’s works have been featured in numerous international solo and group exhibitions, including at the Rubin Museum, New York (2021–22); Akademie der Künste, Vienna (2021); Sharjah Biennial 14 (2019); ZKM Karlsruhe (2016); and Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016).

Accompanying the exhibition a publication with an introduction by Britta Färber as well as a conversation between the artist and Stephanie Rosenthal will be published by Kerber Verlag in February 2025.


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