One Hundred Thousand Suns, 2023

Every day, weather permitting, since 1904,
the staff at the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory in India have recorded images of our Sun.
More than 100 years of solar data.
Almost eleven solar cycles.
More than 157,000 distinct portraits of our nearest star.

One Hundred Thousand Suns brings into conversation the geometry of the Earth, Moon, and Sun, alongside conjunctions of event and site. One Hundred Thousand Suns is another kind of rendering of the Sun. Spanning material, ephemeral, personal, and historical dimensions, the video references over 100,000 portraits of the Sun, captured for over a century at the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory in India.

The film follows the evolution of solar observation, beginning with early hand-drawn sunspots on paper disks, progressing through glass plate astrophotography and datasets from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and culminating in the artist’s own data collections—comprising photographs, drawings, videos, and interviews with eclipse chasers. It emphasizes the idea that the site, the observer, and the methods of observation and collection can generate multiple interpretations of time, data, and truth.

Each of the four channels of the film corresponds to a unique “paradigm” about solar observation, each bringing us the Sun, rendered by hand, by means of photographic emulsion, and through voice and memory.

Paradigm (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 (Twin Suns)
. . . considers the Sun as both knowable and unknowable. It focuses on the collections of lost, never-to-be-repeated moments, captured using nineteenth-century glass plate astrophotography.

Paradigm (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.

Paradigm (Sun Drawings)
. . . 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.

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 in 2021–22. Part of the research for this piece was made possible as part of Five Million Incidents, 2019–2020, supported by Goethe Institut, Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi, in collaboration with Raqs Media Collective.