What Will I Do With All This Land? Sir Raja at Base Camp

This artwork featured in Shakti (2013). 

Calcutta born artist Nikhil Chopra works at the boundaries between performance, live art, painting, photography and sculpture. He devises fictional characters, drawing on India’s colonial past as well as his personal history. He includes these characters in performances that are then documented in photographic works.

The subject of this series, Sir Raja III, is the quintessential privileged anglicised Indian prince, who could have attended the Delhi Durbar and had his photographic portrait taken. Chopra placed Sir Raja in Kashmir, an important landscape in his personal history, and built a narrative around the stereotype of a wandering and melancholic Indian prince. Confronted with the supposed perspectives of power, he anxiously questions: “What will I do with all this land?”.

Image: Nikhil Chopra, What Will I Do With All This Land? Sir Raja at Base Camp, Silver gelatin prints on archival paper. Image courtesy the artist. 

 

About the artist

Nikhil Chopra

Nikhil Chopra exhibited in Shakti, Kedleston Hall, 2014, and Shakti, Space Oddity, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 2013, commissioned by Meadow Arts.

Image: Nikhil Chopra, performance and drawing for Shakti, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Kedleston Hall, 2013-14.