Bending gender, shape and identity, Nikhil Chopra, India’s best known performance artist, uses personal history to question convention
* At the Havana biennale in 2015, Nikhil Chopra’s performance involved living in a cage, placed in the middle of a busy plaza, for 60 hours. For close to three days, he was making drawings, dressed as a 1950s American woman of colour, before hacksawing his way out of the cage.
Performance artist Nikhil Chopra takes on a feminine avatar for his work Yog Raj Chitrakar Memory Drawing IX, digital photograph on archival paper(Picture courtesy: The artist and Chatterjee and Lal)
Nikhil Chopra, one of the best known Indian performance artists in the world, makes a statement by drawing at Srinagar’s iconic Lal Chowk , dressed as a dandy for his series (Photo courtesy: The artist)Performance artist Nikhil Chopra during the India Art Fair in New Delhi (Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times)Lankan performance artist Bandu Manamperi irons his shirt in front of a government building (Photo courtesy: The artist)