Parts Unknown: Making the Familiar Strange

Rohini Devasher, artist

born 1978

Parts Unknown: Making the Familiar Strange, 2016

Material/technique: gilding; colored pencil; projected moving images on wall; paint; charcoal; dry pastel; graphite

Credit line: Courtesy of the artist

Accession number: IA2016.004

Not on display

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Over the course of three weeks, Rohini Devasher meticulously charted a quadrant of the cosmos depicting the star cluster Pleiades, or the Seven Sisters. Seven jewel-like projections overlap this chart with footage from the Indian Astronomical Observatory, located on the high-altitude desert plateau of Ladakh. The slow moving images operate like surveillance cameras of an unmanned space probe slowly transmitting imagery of an alien landscape
back to mission control, or portals in the time-space continuum providing glimpses into a distant world. Combining these two landscapes is a process Devasher calls “strange-ing,” or “making the familiar strange,” the subtitle of the work. The infusion of the unexpected or peculiar into something seemingly familiar, like imagery from our home world, elicits wonder and curiosity.
Devasher created a previous version of Parts Unknown in 2012 using monitors embedded in a wall like windows. Devasher’s installation of Parts Unknown at the Spencer is the largest wall drawing she has ever created, and she said it was the first time she was able to realize the work as she originally intended, using projections for the videos rather than monitors: “I feel like this is what Parts Unknown was always meant to be, at this scale with projected video, because it also does something different to your perspective when you’re viewing it.”