On the construction site of the Whitworth’s new wing to be devoted to landscape art, Nikhil Chopra performed Coal on Cotton, 2013, as part of the Manchester International Festival. Known for creating large-scale representational drawings in front of an audience, as a performance, Chopra is unusual in that both aspects of his practice appear to carry equal weight.

Coal on Cotton took its inspiration from the nineteenth-century trade route for cotton between Manchester and Mumbai. Chopra’s performance unfolded over sixty-five hours, from sunrise on a Friday morning to sunset on Sunday, as he successively inhabited three personae: those of a cotton farmer, a mill worker, and a mill owner. As spectators gathered in the foyer of the Whitworth, he rose from a wrap of cotton sheets, then, dressed in simple robes, dragged a large bale of cotton into the roofless shell of the future landscape gallery. This was the farmer. Once unraveled, the bale turned out to be a rectangular tent, which eventually enveloped the entirety of the space, and also served as Chopra’s canvas. Covering his face in chalk and donning overalls, the farmer turned into an ill-tempered mill worker and began drawing with charcoal. Chopra’s point of departure came from a series of his own photographs of the Manchester landscape. The images, taken from a high-rise during an earlier visit, were based on a nineteenth-century landscape drawing in the Whitworth’s collection. As the day progressed, a cityscape grew from the landscape, filling one wall of the tent; smokestacks appeared, then billowing plumes of smoke rose up across the ceiling of the tent, recalling Manchester both past and present. Over two days Chopra as mill worker labored on a landscape that included Manchester and eventually Mumbai, thus joining the two end points of the trade route. On finishing the drawing, the worker shaved his beard and trimmed and waxed his mustache, becoming the dandyish mill owner. In low tones, the boss ordered his assistants to disassemble the tent and carry the drawing outside, where the large work was draped on the facade of the gallery for the next week: a landscape in a landscape.

By eating, sleeping, and working in the space, Chopra inevitably brought to mind Joseph Beuys, but where that artist played up the shamanistic and transformative aspects of his performance, Chopra seems to be more of a historian. Coal on Cotton, like most of his work, conjured a bygone era, that of British colonialism as well as of more rigidly defined class structures. Yet where does drawing fit in with the roles Chopra was portraying? How does this historical content relate to the drawing and, indeed, to his identity as a contemporary performance artist? Chopra has said that making images or photographs is a way to claim ownership over things: “My take on it is to reclaim a certain kind of history, to return, in fact, [to] this Orientalist discussion about the Western traveler coming to the East and making documents and taking them back home. I want to be the Oriental, perhaps, that comes to the West and makes drawings.” But is his reclamation critical or merely representational? Drawing is one kind of depiction in his performance; so is acting out the roles dictated by class and identity. Coal on Cotton seemed to stitch together many different cultures, roles, and activities (Indian and English, worker and artist, drawing and performance). However unresolved, it’s the tension tied up in this bundle that makes Chopra’s art worth watching.

—Sherman Sam