Spheres

Rohini Devasher creates imagined worlds in her work evoking both wonder and awe. Spheres explores ideas of interiority, inversion and the construction of a 'climate' that evokes a strangeness, not of haunting but of wonder. Through a series of encounters between the ‘natural’ and ‘technological’, intersecting patterns between the two will be made visible.
Spheres is somewhere between reality and fiction. Shot on-site at the Mt. Aso caldera in Japan, the site is re-imagined so we seem to be looking inside some form of hollowed-out space, a sphere or cylinder. Spheres is a work in four parts. In the first, we see a strange crater, which stands as a sentinel of past upheaval; we see mist, cloud and fog, a distant horizon, an atmosphere. And we see a cylindrical sea, rising overhead. An artificial sun or suns simulate a daylight cycle, illuminating and obscuring the landscape by turns. The following chapters - the valley and the cloud-maker or active volcano, are each by turns, propositions, both geographic and metaphoric of an attempt to imply the unobservable, on the basis, of what can be observed. The images conjured are a species of “chimera”. They are one thing, standing in for something else, pushing the limits of the known and the imagined. The landscape because of its scale provides an almost mythic realisation of oneself within an environment.

The work was featured as part of the exhibition 'Asymmetrical Objects', curated by Tasneem Zakaria Mehta and co-curated by Himanshu Kadam. The exhibition presented the works of ten contemporary artists whose practice includes an interest in nature and science or consumption and degradation as process and product, to respond to these ideas and to explore the much-debated Age of the Anthropocene and its impact on the environment and the effects on biodiversity.