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Girish Shahane writes about Nikhil Chopra at Documenta 14 | Scroll.in
Published online: June 24, 2017
“Indian highlights
The Indian presence was fairly strong in Athens and Kassel, thanks, presumably, to one of the exhibition’s advisors, Natasha Ginwalla, who is the first Indian to have made it to the top echelon of international curators. Delhi artist Amar Kanwar was accorded the singular honour of being invited to documenta for the fourth consecutive exhibition.
My favourite Indian piece in Kassel was the performance artist Nikhil Chopra’s Drawing a Line Through Landscape. Chopra is known for performances that last hours or even days. For documenta, he stretched that timeline further, travelling from Athens to Kassel by road, sleeping in a tent and painting onto its canvas sides representations of the landscapes he traversed. That tent, along with a video capturing moments from his East European sojourn, and the paintings he made, now stitched together in one long panorama,were presented in an abandoned underground station in Kassel, where he ended his 28-day performance.
Not only is Chopra an unflagging performer of rare stamina and concentration, he is also an excellent draughtsman, capable of producing vigorous drawings and carefully-wrought likenesses in difficult circumstances. What do I mean by difficult? Try painting on the cloth of a tent on a windy day, or even on a still day. His performances require heaps of skill, and their meaning grows out of it. I’m heartily sick of discovering the point of a work solely through reading about the its historical context in the wall text, or through a sappy biographical back-story, and there was far too much of that in documenta 14.”
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