Frieze Magazine | Shows | Rohini Devasher

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Rohini Devasher

Bloodlines (2009)

In India’s postcolonial narrative, science – cast as an agency of modernity – enjoyed a certain cachet as a temporal Nehruvian counterpoint to the spiritual Gandhian idealized rural. However, barring perhaps its nominal presence in the bronzes of the pioneer modernist sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee’s half-imagined flora and Piscean forms, science seems to have failed in finding much currency in modern Indian art. Mithu Sen’s anatomical drawings and the neurosis-laced canvases and mock science-pedagogy of Abhishek Hazra’s ludic video installations are some instances of science providing, however incidentally, content. However one of the most candid, if somewhat nerdish, engagements with science can be found in the works of New Delhi-based artist Rohini Devasher.

Early in her career Devasher – who trained as a printmaker – was inspired by Goethe’s Urpflanze, or the archetypal plants – as much a poetic as it was a quasi-scientific construct that was acknowledged by Charles Darwin. Initially to explore what Goethe described as ‘the essential form with which, as it were, Nature always plays, and from which she produces her great variety’ and later to study any system that could spontaneously organize itself, Devasher found her niche by adopting a counter-intuitive tool – digital technology – or, more specifically, video feedback. She plays with the parameters of ambient light to allow the feedback to throw up shapes and patterns. When layered in the finished video together these parts organize themselves – seemingly of their own volition – into an animated strange-yet-familiar shape-shifting simulacrum of the natural world.

Doppelganger (2011)

Doppelganger (2011), a seven-minute, two-channel video, is an easy introduction to Devasher’s art and technique. Displayed on a tablet-sized LCD screen, it depicts two nearly identical dragonflies composed of intricate bits of anatomy created using manipulated video feedback stacked in layers which, when run, are rendered into a fictive – albeit cogent and convincing – morphological studies of the evolution of two dragonflies in a dazzling, mercurial metamorphoses. Along with Devasher’s other similar works, Doppelganger spans the chasm between the empirical and the imaginative to claim the fertile ground of the intuitive, to reinstate it as the shared core of the seemingly dichotomous pair of disciplines: art and science. In the process Devasher not just questions dogmas around the Creation and the natural phenomena, but ropes in science to further the debates on originality and authorship.

Equally viscerally conceived is Bloodlines (2009), a video and print installation consisting of a 45-minute-long single channel video projected in loop along side a large digital print of the entire genealogy of parents organisms become superimposed in the video to produce a variety of offspring. Devasher was already into almost-autonomously generated forms when she chanced upon militant evolutionist and atheist Richard Dawkins’ automatically generated forms called ‘biomorphs’ that visitors to his web site could help generate through a JAVA applet. Devasher cites Dawkins’ proposition as an inspiration for her – that both the variety and the complexity in the natural order are accidental results of inexhaustible combination of genes in different permutations – but gives little impression that she has joined in in Dawkins’ campaign against God. This selective approach to using theories along with often redundant use of jargon makes her depth of engagement with science as an artist suspect at times – given too that she has no grounding in the subject.

Arboreal (2011)

Yet, it is in her wide-eyed curiosity that one discerns a Nehruvian secular and sincere equation with science. The levels of abstraction and complexity in Arboreal (2011) – a 15-minute-long video and a series of large prints derived from it – signal a departure for Devasher. The video is constructed by manually layering 700 layers of video to mimic – by repeating a pattern of video feedback inspired by the Lindenmayer system in formal grammar often used to model plant growth – the complexity of a tree’s branching. The large video projection that seems to be a series of dissolving images of ghoulish canopies of leafless trees caught in the glare of car headlights recall scenes from the horror movie, The Blair Witch Project (1991). The series of stills from the video of full-fledged trees share their eeriness with Olympia the automaton doll, a character from 19th-century popular horror fiction cited as one of the instances of the uncanny by Sigmund Freud in his seminal essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919). ‘The uncanny’, writes Freud, ‘is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’ Hovering between the ‘old and long familiar’ real and the unreal, their existence owing to digital and metaphorical narcissistic doubling, and the ambiguity of their status both as the subject and object of both the video cameras and the viewers’ gaze, are some of the many possible Freudian readings Devasher’s ‘trees’ lend themselves to.

Hemant Sareen