Overview

2024, live performance and drawing, commissioned by SAVVY Contemporary, duration: 3 hours

Accompanied by Rittik Wystup on piano, costume design by Tabsheer Zutshi

From Water to Fire is a performance that contemplates the predicament of the human and our relationship to ecology. According to science, life began in water and as the planet cooled, we crawled out of our fluid waterscapes to breathe air and walk on land. As humans what has distinguished us from the rest of the organic world is a collective act, in which fire became a major force to bring us together, to cook our food, to keep us warm, to blaze our nights, and to enact war. The energy harvested by the sun became implemented to burn to flames. And as moths to a flame, those distracted and turned magnets to a destructive fire emboldening borders and impositions upon Indigenous land and its communities, threaten to burn the very wings that set us free. As we run out of fuel to burn, those powers of imposition causing climate change have never been more palpable. Chopra asks us to consider the work of Francois Vergès on the Capitalocene, identifying various hierarchies of agents responsible for such global destruction: highlighting how capitalist economies prioritize profit over environmental sustainability, leading to exploitation of resources and labor, particularly in marginalized communities. This capitalist-driven devastation, fueled by imperial and colonially-tied corporations, governments, and economic systems, exacerbates climate change and perpetuates social inequalities on a global scale while political majoritarian powers reign.

For a duration of three hours, Nikhil Chopra, in the persona of Nasha Talash, will make a drawing of the endless ocean with a solitary island and a volcanic fire upon it: with flames transfiguring into missiles overhead, stirring associations to regions around the world that are violently militarized and occupied. Nasha Talash is the literal Urdu translation of “being in search of intoxication”; Nasha is loosely based on a decadent Mughal demi-king in a state of intoxication. He is drunk with art, music and poetry, walking the line between medicine and poison, the beautiful and ugly, the joyful and painful, consumption and creating. Chopra asks us to consider the balance between each, the equilibrium we must seek, together and alone, in our paths as we walk in unison.

The charcoal on paper drawing left behind as a footprint of the performance will be mounted on a wall. The process of making the drawing is scored by an improvised piano composition played live by Berlin-based musician and sound artist, Rittik Wystup. The performance will be punctuated with a series of transformations in Nikhil’s persona: we will see him go from a muddy masked body to a bejeweled Nasha Talash. How does this transition take place? What are the wisdoms and the dangers found within it?

Excerpt from: SAVVY Contemporary.