Thursday, September 17, 2015, 6pm
Le jeudi 17 septembre à 18h00
Concordia University Fine Arts
York Amphitheatre
EV Building 1.615
1515 St Catherine West, Montreal
L’université de Concordia, 1515 St. Catherine Ouest, Montréal
www.finearts.concordia.ca
Admission for all Conversations in Contemporary Art events is FREE and open to the general public. Seating is first come, first serve. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. The lectures will be held in English.
Tous les événements du programme Conversation in Contemporary Art sont gratuits et ouverts au public. Les sièges sont assignés selon le principe du premier arrivé, premier servi. Les portes ouvrent à 17h30. Les conférences se dérouleront en anglais.
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Nikhil Chopra is an artist based in Goa, whose durational performative works blur the boundaries between theatre and painting, performance and drawing.
His performances began in 2010 with a series of Memory Drawings, where he inhabited the persona of a turn of the century figure, Yog Raj Chitrakar, assuming different aspects, changing between masculine and feminine identities, and moving between closed and public spaces in response to the different locales and their histories. Among more recent performances have been: inside out (San Gimignano, 2012, 99 hours), in which he and lived and worked within the Arco dei Becci exhibition space and assumed the guise of different personae in his wanderings through the town and countryside; Blackening II (Berlin, 2013, 5 hours) in which, naked, and eyes covered with duct tape, he made drawings on the walls with charcoal and white chalk, in the presence of the unseen audience; Coal on Cotton at the Manchester International Festival (2013, 65 hours) displaying a large charcoal panorama executed in successive personae as farmer, textile worker and industrial magnate; La Perle Noire, at the 12th Havana Biennial (2015) where, locked inside a cage for three days, he painted what was in view, then hacksawed his way free.
The Montreal iteration of La Perle Noire is a 57-hour drawing performance in a gazebo in Jarry Park, to be followed by an installation of these drawings at the FOFA gallery. The series La Perle Noire explores questions of identity and difference, exoticism and the everyday, and the multiple valences of place.
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Aujourd’hui installé à Goa, Nikhil Chopra privilégie l’œuvre-spectacle continue. Dans ses créations, il emprunte aussi bien au théâtre qu’à la peinture, au dessin qu’à l’art action.
Il inaugure le cycle de ses performances en 2010 avec la série Memory Drawings (« dessins de mémoire »), où il campe un personnage issu de la belle époque, Yog Raj Chitrakar. Suivant les lieux et leur histoire, il revêt divers aspects, il mêle rôles masculins et féminins, il se déplace d’espaces publics en endroits clos... En 2012, il présente à San Gimignano l’œuvre inside out(« à l’envers ») : pendant 99 heures, il vit et travaille dans une salle d’exposition de l’Arco dei Becci. Selon qu’il se
