September 21, 2026 | Art & Culture
NIKHIL CHOPRA
the FICTION of SELF
words Rajesh Punj
photos 1- Francesco Raco
FIRE X FIRE: Embers / Braci, 3 hours performance with Uriel Barthelemi.
Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua.
2- Okno Studio. EMBERS / BRACI, Exhibition Views. Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua.
"The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible," wrote Allan Kaprow, whose pioneering experiments helped redefine the possibilities of art in the twentieth century. Decades later, Joseph Beuys would similarly argue that art was not merely the production of objects, but a way of shaping experience itself—a social and existential act through which individuals might engage with the world. Though emerging from different traditions, both artists challenged the notion of art as something separate from lived reality. Few contemporary practitioners embody this proposition more completely than Nikhil Chopra.
For more than two decades, Chopra has cultivated a practice in which performance, drawing, theatre, installation, history, and everyday life are woven together into a continuous and evolving act of becoming. To encounter Chopra's work is to encounter time itself. His performances frequently unfold over many hours or days, sometimes extending across entire exhibition periods, resisting the accelerated rhythms of contemporary culture in favour of duration, attentiveness, and sustained presence. The spectator is not presented with a singular event or climactic moment but invited into an unfolding process in which action accumulates slowly, often imperceptibly. Sleeping, walking, drawing, dressing, resting, performing, and making become equally significant gestures within a broader choreography of existence.
In Chopra's hands, performance is not spectacle but habitation: a way of occupying space, inhabiting history, and testing the body as a site of memory and transformation. In India, where performance art has historically remained less prominent than painting or sculpture despite deep ritual and theatrical traditions, his practice has taken on a particularly distinct position. Over more than two decades, Chopra has developed one of the most internationally recognised performance practices of his generation, while resisting easy placement within either Western performance art or Indian contemporary art. His work instead occupies a fluid space between disciplines, drawing from theatre, portraiture, colonial histories, autobiography, landscape, and the performative traditions of everyday life.
A SUFFERING YOU MIGHT EXPECT FROM A BOXER
RAJESH PUNJ: What amazes me is the level of concentration that goes into your performances. It's almost exhausting to watch because I feel like you're suffering. You're not, of course; it seems more mental.
NIKHIL CHOPRA: Yes, it's a suffering that you might expect from a boxer. There is a delight in watching someone overcome pain and adversity, and in seeing how one tackles that artistically. A sportsman trains for hours. I think it's excruciating to be anything of value to anyone in life. I think that is painful. The question is, when we present ourselves, how do we use that moment to overcome fear and agony, and confront it? Doing the Kochi Biennale was a classic example of how agonising, and at the same time how incredibly rewarding, an experience like that can be. It takes a hell of a lot out of you to do something like that.
RP: Then there's being with other people. I imagine you're a very private person. To be in the public eye for so many days, in something like that...
NC: I am. I think that has to come from privacy. The fact that you're comfortable putting yourself on display isn't because you're an exhibitionist who likes being on display all the time. For me, it comes from a practice rooted in privacy. You have to have that grounding because, even in a public situation, people are being invited into that privacy. An artist exposing the way they make meaning, or form an opinion, is revealing something that would ordinarily only happen in the studio.
“THE BODY, AND THE LANGUAGE THAT EMERGES FROM THE BODY”
RP: There seems to be a greater vulnerability in what you do than in what a painter or sculptor does. You're not only producing something; your body, physically, is out there. For most of us, we couldn't do that.
NC: I think you do.
RP: Well, it's enough for me to put my writing out there.
NC: Which is the same thing. It's material, right? The idea is to have a detached relationship with it because you're wanting to have a critical dialogue and a critical exchange. You've got to get Nikhil out of the room in order for people to have an objective and critical conversation with the work. Otherwise, why would you use your most vulnerable material and put yourself out there? In your case it's your text and your writing. In my case it's the body, and the language that emerges from the body.
RP: It's interesting because most people go the other way. They find a vulnerable point and stay within their comfort zone. So, there's something exceptional about what you do and how you do it. Some of your performances have gone on for fifty-six or even seventy-two hours. You're really stretching yourself.
NC: But you see, I can't have that relationship with it. I can't start placing what I do in an exceptional category. At the end of the day, what I'm doing also has to be read as ordinary. Otherwise, I'm attaching too much importance to it. I want to demystify it. I don't want to shroud it in any more mystery than already surrounds the idea of performance.
“IT HAS TO REMAIN GROUNDED IN THE EVERYDAY”
RP: And that's interesting, because the way you see it is very different from how the audience receives it. We, as the audience, see it as exceptional, extraordinary, even.
NC: Perhaps. But for me, it has to remain grounded in the everyday. That's important.
RP: So now, here, this is a different kind of performance, isn't it? It's a collaboration.
NC: It's a collaboration. It's a dialogue between me and Uriel, and we've been in dialogue for quite a while. The introduction of sound is important.
RP: Which is unusual for you. Most of the performances I've watched are marked by a kind of heavy silence.
NC: This work is, in a sense, about summoning demons. Sound works very well with fire as a subject, as opposed to land. There's something lyrical about it. Fire needs a certain rhythm, a certain base. It allows us to enter that shamanic, demonic space. Fire has always been bound up with ritual in a way that no other element has. Air, you breathe. Water, you drink. Land, you walk upon. But fire does something to us. It has also fundamentally altered the course of this planet. We proliferated because of fire. We philosophised because of fire. We became communal because of fire. We sat together around it. In a sense, that's also the beginning of the story of global warming. The moment we struck two pieces of flint together and learned to harvest the energy of the sun, the fate of our species, and of this planet, changed forever. Like moths to a flame, we became captivated by it; by the unknown, by the night, by storytelling. Fire is bound up with theatre, with drama, with shadow and chiaroscuro. The reason we ventured into the darkness as a species is because we carried this powerful thing with us.
RP: Within Indian philosophy there must be a great deal written and said about that.
NC: Absolutely. Fire is the test. Fire exists in the space between this world and another.
RP: Philosophically, in Sanskrit thought, and religiously, there are huge traditions built around it.
NC: There are. But I try not to overread the subject I'm working with. Sometimes that can dominate the idea and prevent one from thinking freely. I allow the act of making the artwork to do the work.
RP: Because the other thing I felt yesterday was that fire reads as a commentary on the present moment. It carries a sense of violence and aggression.
NC: Completely.
RP: There's a kind of global aggression now, a temperament, a tension, that feels impossible to ignore.
“FOR ME, THE FIRE IS LIFE ITSELF”
NC: I think the problem begins when we divide things into good and bad. What appears good can be bad; what appears bad can be good. Fire is an energy. So is water. So is air. We are made up of all of these things. We are stardust at the end of the day. If we're made up of land, water and air, then where is the fire? For me, the fire is life itself. It's the heart beating. It's blood moving through the veins. It's the body generating heat. And like any flame, it has a lifespan. At some point, the candle burns out. At some point, the fire dies.
RP: I wanted to ask you about performance in India. When you were growing up and later at art school, there were few reference points for what you were doing. That must have made it difficult to see performance as a legitimate artistic practice, especially when painting, sculpture and photography were the more established paths.
NC: There were some reference points, but at some point, those reference points have to become motors of their own. India has an enormous tradition of performance through dance, theatre, ritual, and the performing arts. But what was perhaps missing was a critical contemporary discourse around performance as an art practice.
RP: I suppose what I'm really asking is how you were received when you first decided to pursue this path.
NC: What happened in India at that moment was that the stage was set. The audience was ready. There was an immense openness to receive new ideas and to reconsider what contemporary art practice could mean from a South Asian perspective. There was a real desire for something fresh, something new, a different direction. Somehow, I fit into that moment. It was a little like a Cinderella story, the shoe was there, and somebody needed to try it on.
“IDENTITY IS MORE COMPLICATED THAN A LABEL”
RP: But you were also part of that moment when artists were increasingly grouped together as "Indian artists.”
NC: Yes, and that was something I was already thinking critically about. I kept asking myself whether I was being invited because I was saying something interesting within contemporary art, or because I was Indian. That troubled me. We're doing all this work to dissolve boundaries and challenge assumptions, yet I was constantly being framed as "the Indian artist" or "India's performance artist." I wanted people to simply say "performance artist." Not because I wanted to deny where I come from, many of the tropes and references in my work come directly from the history of the subcontinent, but because identity is more complicated than a label.
