Rohini Devasher’s artistic concerns

Rohini Devasher’s work features at a group show, entitled ‘Rendez-vous 12’, conceptualized by ten international curators at the Iziko South African National Gallery (ISANG)’

Key areas of contemplation and discovery to artist Rohini Devasher remain pattern recognition and pattern formation within organic form and an understanding of the universal underlying structure within nature’s complexity. She elaborates: “In the scientific realm, as the rate of genetic modification accelerates, the boundary of form and function blurs and these chimeras become more of a possibility of what could be.”

In her quest to define the ambiguous space between science and art, imagined and observed reality, Rohini Devasher’s continues to experiment with different mediums, such as digital prints, drawing and video. Each of them brings something unique to the respective work and consequently carries with it an uncharted territory to explore.

Born in 1978, the artist lives and works in Delhi. She received her MFA in Printmaking from Winchester School of Art in the UK and her BFA from the College of Art, Delhi. She has exhibited in group shows at the Apeejay Media Gallery and Vadehra Art Gallery, Delhi; Green Cardamom & the British Library, London; Bose Pacia, Kolkata; and the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh. She was awarded the KHOJ International Arts & Sciences Residency as well as the INLAKS Fine Art Award and a Sarai Associate Fellowship.

Her ‘Bloodlines’ featured at The Hong Kong International Art Fair 2010, courtesy Mumbai’s Project 88, enlivened ‘a warehouse, full of impossible monsters…’. It took a cue from evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, who put forward this intriguing idea in his document 'The Blind Watchmaker'. Exploring the theory of cumulative selection, it presented a curious family tree of constructed artificial evolution.

Explaining this unusual piece of art, the write-up had stated: “It begins with seven forms; parents let us say. Each ‘parent’ form is the result of a gradual construction of an intricate skeletal structure made of individual, manually placed layers of video. The original footage consists of video feedback that occurs when a loop is created between a video camera and a television screen or monitor.” And what did it lead to? An astonishing array of spatiotemporal patterns spontaneously emerged from the feedback system.