One Hundred Thousand Suns

One Hundred Thousand Suns, installation view, MSP Foundation San Francisco, image credit Henrik Kam, 2024

Every day, weather permitting, since 1904,
the staff at the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory in India, have recorded images of our Sun.
125 years of solar data.
Almost 11 solar cycles.
More than 157,000 distinct portraits of our nearest star.
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One Hundred Thousand Suns is another kind of rendering of the Sun. Spanning material, ephemeral, personal, and historical dimensions, the film references over 100,000 portraits of the Sun captured for over a century at the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory in India. Through a rich blend of the observatory’s archival material, NASA public-domain images, and her own data collections, Devasher brings us the Sun, observed by hand, by photographic emulsion, by voice and memory. Thick with time and research, the film follows the evolution of solar observation, from early hand-drawn sun spots on paper disks to glass plate astro-photography, to the artist’s data collections (photographs, drawings, videos, and interviews with eclipse chasers).

Each of the four channels of the film corresponds to a unique paradigm about solar observation.

Paradigm 1: Site features the instruments and people at the historic Kodaikanal Solar Observatory, some of whom have been observing the Sun for four generations. It also looks at the complex history of the Observatory, which, when it was established in 1899, took over the activities of the Madras Observatory founded by the British East India Company in 1786.

Paradigm 2: Drawing the Sun explores observation over time using naked-eye drawings of sunspots created between 1902 and 1904. It questions the nature of drawing when faced with an object that is not only unfamiliar but one that is in most cases, difficult to understand, see, and draw.

Paradigm 3: Twin Suns considers the Sun as both knowable and unknowable. It focuses on the collections of lost, never-to-be-repeated moments, captured using 19th-century glass plate astro-photography.

Paradigm 4: Eclipse offers a meditation on light and memory. Footage of the eclipsed Sun caught in the beam of the 60-meter tunnel telescope at the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory is layered with the voices of eclipse chasers who have devoted their lives to standing in the shadow of the Moon.

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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.

This work would not have been possible without the generous support of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, (IIA) Bengaluru and the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory.
Part of the research for this piece was made possible through Five Million Incidents (2019–2020), supported by Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi, in collaboration with Raqs Media Collective.