The People Behind The Portraits
In
November, Indian performance artist Nikhil Chopra transformed himself into a
Victorian portrait artist at Wolverhampton Art Gallery and, over the course of
three days, created a new work exploring cultural connections and historical
backgrounds of the people who live in the city today. Rebecca Morris watched
the 18-hour performance, which was commissioned by Meadow Arts as part of multi-venue exhibition Shakti.
Chopra’s
dapper appearance matches the surroundings in the Victorian Gallery. His dark
hair is closely cropped with a neat moustache and he is wearing a long
Victorian frock coat, complemented by a crisp white shirt, burgundy waistcoat,
a green spotted cravat and a black bowler hat. An Indian Dhoti is assembled
into regulation black trousers. A portrait from the collection, An Egyptian Beauty by Thomas Pelham
(1860-92), hangs on the wall as inspiration for what is to come and
assembled in the centre of the gallery on a slightly raised platform there is
an antique chair, table and tea service on a carpet from Bantock House Museum
amid purple and gold Indian silk fabrics from India. At the side of the
gallery, piles of charcoal sticks in a variety of sizes lie in bundles along
with several brown paper packages tied up with string.
Observed
by an audience of art lovers and interested bystanders, Chopra works in
silence, communicating only with the people from the audience he selects as
sitters and serving them with tea and biscuits from the antique tea service.
They either sit or stand by the chair, whose presence is reflected in every
portrait.
The
event, entitled Space Oddity, has been inspired by the Art Gallery’s
collection of Indian artefacts and eight people who have come from other parts
of the world to live in Wolverhampton. “The landscape is a Space Oddity and it is an imagined place - a place that could be
anywhere,” explains Chopra. “The words allude to the strangeness of a place and
it’s an oddity to find all these sitters in the landscape, juxtaposing their
reality with a fantasy that isn’t here. The title is familiar to most people as
a 1969 song by British Glam Rock icon David Bowie and it was a time in British
history of rock and roll, women’s rights, the empowerment of the working class,
booming Western economies and migrants in their 100,000s arriving from the
ex-colonies to cities like Wolverhampton.”
“The
chair appears in each portrait and it has a personality of its own. I felt I
understood it better towards the end of the performance and it’s an endless
process of discovery and evolution, getting better with every drawing. Maybe
the chair is Wolverhampton, mimicking life with the sitters staying for a
while, their portraits leaving a trace, a mark, before they go.”
Photo credits: Nikhil Chopra, Space Oddity, 18 hour performance, 2013. Photos: Stefan Handy, Costumes: Loise
Braganza.
A Meadow Arts commission in collaboration with Wolverhampton
Art Gallery.
First published in Wolverhampton Arts & Heritage Magazine
First published in Wolverhampton Arts & Heritage Magazine
