“I do not view the Met as a neutral space.”

Over a period of nine days, Nikhil Chopra travelled from one gallery to another at The Met, New York, making his own nomadic itinerary and disrupting the rules and organisation principles of the museum. Lands, Waters and Skies is an honest engagement with colonial histories, museums as sites of power imbalance, and the modernist narrative created by landscapes. Challenging fixed geographies, the artist breaks the constructs of “frontiers” and similar “margins” by engaging in a countermapping—proceeding from galleries housing European diptychs and 19th-century ceramics to Dutch paintings. He recreates journeys historically undertaken by Romani migrants and refugees, escaping wars in East European cities. 

At every point, the artist characterises the journey by changing his symbolic clothes, involving sonic and visual elements in his performance—leaving behind his mark, or mark making. Museums, as a space, too create marks in identities and produce frames on the physical and the moral. The artist’s focus is on objects housed in the museum that have undeniable links to colonial violence. He envelopes the environment, the people and the display in large-scale drawings, visually narrating incidents of human displacement and the erasure and transformation of history. Imperialist passages of trade flows and movement leave behind their own violence and instead, Nikhil wishes to encompass the idea of Arjun Appadurai’s process geography. This reframes geography and generates variable, shifting geographies, based on fluidity and the interdependent nature of spatial relationships. Such thinking invites one to embrace deterritorialisation and understand the power imbalance created by restriction of movements, including migration. The final landscape painting of the mountains, land and sky is a poignant double commentary—on the one hand portraying imperialist and modernist roots of landscape to capture purification of the visual field, and on the other, showing a Zomia-like environment, challenging man-made colonial borders, drawing the voice of those wishing for political autonomy and recognition. Embracing the lack of geographical compactness of his final work, Lands, Waters and Skies departs from narratives of peripheralisation and linear histories. Ultimately, it shows us how the museum “frames” the cultural and the moral, and its construction is inextricably linked to colonial greed.