It is not immediately clear how Anoushka Mirchandani relates to India, either in the context of her own identity or that of her family’s past. References to her heritage are folded into the articulated material and symbolic texture of her works, which she deliberately leaves open to multiple layers of interpretation. While her visual language might appear at first glance as two-dimensional, simplified figuration, it eventually reveals a far more complex, interwoven system of references that connects her own daily experience in America with a broader family lineage of past traumas and struggles, while seeking a place between temporal and cultural dimensions. Her work is centered on the notion of identity as fluid, shaped by the situations we confront but also in continuous negotiation with the conditions that we carry within us.
After a stellar year of institutional exposure with a show currently on view at ICA San Jose, Mirchandani opened a solo presentation last month at the FLAG Art Foundation, “Everyone You Love Lives Here,” in which her work is staged in dialogue with that of artists including Cindy Sherman, Lisa Yuskavage and Louise Bourgeois, positioning her in a broader art historical conversation around the body, interiority and the construction of identity. After the opening, we caught up with the artist in her studio at Silver Art Projects, where she was a 2026 resident and has been offered the opportunity to extend through next year.
|
“Everyone You Love Lives Here“ |
Her visual narrative is animated by female characters who always appear translucent and inherently porous, chameleon-like in the way they blend and merge with their surroundings. These figures speak clearly about assimilation and displacement—something Mirchandani experienced firsthand when she migrated alone as a young woman to the U.S. for her studies, leaving her family and her life behind in India, where she would return often.
She attended a small college in Ohio on scholarship and said that it was there, for the first time, that she understood racial segregation in America. While India has colorism and casteism, she noted, she had not experienced racial segregation in the same way. In Ohio, she felt like a fish out of water and very observed. “When I was trying to assimilate in America, I was doing it by myself. I did not have the tools to function in American society, and I had to learn them on my own,” she shared, recalling how she was angry with her mother because she felt she had not taught her how to assert herself in space. “In India, you don’t do that. You don’t raise your hand in class; you blend into the community.”
When she moved to the United States, she could understand emotionally what it meant to be part of a diaspora, but she had mostly encountered that experience in literature and film rather than in visual art. From that realization, Mirchandani began developing her own lexicon to translate this specific emotional and psychological condition: “I started thinking about how our identities are constantly in a process of reconstruction, flux and motion, and I wanted to understand what that could look like visually. And I started creating these transparencies and thinking about what it feels like to hold uncertainty in the body.”
One thing she kept returning to was the desire to be held but not defined. Her works resist the pressure to present overt cultural markers that would allow viewers to consume identity in a literal and easily categorized way. “There are so many questions right now at work based on identity politics: Where is home? What about belonging?” she said. “I don’t think we are beyond those questions, but I think it is exciting to have an identity that is in flux.” Indian culture is in the work but as a coded language. A chair, floor pattern or architectural detail may locate a painting for someone from South Asia while remaining mysterious to viewers outside that context. “I like the mystery of that. It is ‘if you know, you know.’ It is more like poetry, which is one of my big inspirations.”
Mirchandani prefers to describe the women in her paintings as anonymous but deeply personal, and they condense her matrilineage—her mother, grandmother and sister—into a single subject. “The work is very autobiographical and personal, but I don’t feel it is my duty or responsibility as an artist to spoon-feed anybody my cultural history,” she said, explaining how these figures are not simply alter egos but move between self and archetype, opening onto broader questions of feminine experience across generations. While her work is often read through the lens of femininity, it also carries broader reflections on ancestry, belonging and roots. “It is easy to read the work solely in one way, but that is what I push against. The work should not be resolved in a single takeaway. Actually, no work should be resolved in a single takeaway.”
In totality, her work originates from her ongoing engagement with family history and from an archive she has been building over the past several years, much of it drawn from oral histories with her two grandmothers, both of whom are still alive and in their nineties. All four of her grandparents were children between the ages of 10 and 13 when India was partitioned in 1947 under British rule. At the time, they were living in what is now Pakistan and later came to India. What struck Mirchandani about the way they recalled that period was the language they used to describe it: “If you ask them about it, they say, ‘Oh, we moved.’ And I say, ‘You didn’t move. You were forcibly displaced.’ Some of them lived in refugee camps; some of them lived in shared houses. I think they did not have the space to emotionally excavate it. They had to say, ‘We have to get on this train on this date.’ They were living in survival mode, so they did not really have time to think about it. I don’t think they even had the language for it at the time.”
As Mirchandani describes it, her work operates on the principle of ‘if you know, you know,’ and she doesn’t feel those stories need to be there for public listening all the time. “I don’t think I need to wear my generational trauma on my sleeve,” she explained. “I want people to be able to enter the world of work from different points of view.”
She eventually connected her grandparents’ displacement to her own experience of assimilation after moving from India to the United States. In the way her figures integrate with their environment, she also suggests a notion of identity as always interdependent with it: “It is about how much of yourself you put into the background and how much you put into the foreground. You shape-shift based on the context you are in. I think everybody does it, really, but if you are a woman, you have to do it more. And if you are straddling multiple cultures, you are also deciding which parts of your identity are being revealed and concealed.”
Although her compositions emerge from this memorial, deeply emotional space, each work tends to be highly planned. Every painting begins with a red terracotta layer, a color that grounds the foundational material and symbolic level of her work back in India and, more specifically, in the red dust she grew up surrounded by. “It has become a really ritualistic aspect of my practice. It doesn’t feel right to start a painting without it,” she reflected. “The color kept coming back to me, and over time it receded into the foundational layer. Now it is everywhere. In some paintings, you see it more, and in others, less.”
Once that first layer is down, she builds each painting from top to bottom, layer after layer. The image-making process often begins with photographic references; each composition is carefully planned, often sketched on an iPad, but shifts as it moves onto the canvas. The body she portrays most often ends up inhabiting different layers of the painting rather than sitting on the surface: “I am always thinking about which layer of the painting the body is going to live in. I like that the body lives in the interstitial layers. I am thinking of each figure more as a collage and puzzles, echoing the idea of identity as fragmented but somehow coming together as a whole.”
Particularly interesting is the way Mirchandani plays with positive and negative space: in her work, the body becomes a vessel, something that can contain and enter into dialogue with something else—an interchange between physical, imaginative and spiritual dimensions. While working with an oral historian on her family recordings, she noticed that the women in her family frequently speak about what lies beyond the known in very casual terms: stories of fairies, figures emerging from picture frames and other supernatural occurrences treated as ordinary. “It is not magic exactly, but it is beyond the known. And we all talk about it so casually,” she says. “It would be stories like, ‘Your mother was on the balcony playing with the fairies,’ or ‘This person came out of the picture frame and was at dinner.’ It was very normalized. So there is very much a spirit in the work.”
That sense of continuous interchange between physical and outer realms appears in the work through marks that might recall incense smoke, hair, fog or breath. Mirchandani also connects it to her cultural and religious background. “I am from the Sindhi community, and in the temple, what you worship is a very large book. The guru or pandit has this giant feather fan that he moves over the book the whole time,” she recalled. “There is something about that imagery for me. I love these wisps of fog and spirit.”
These histories and cultural references mostly enter the paintings obliquely, but in the short film she made last year—screened at MoMA as part of the New Directors/New Films festival—she allowed for a more contextual narrative. “I started in photography, so I am really interested in the image, in perspective, and in changing perspective. Film felt like a very natural place to share that narrative,” she pointed out, arguing that the paintings, by contrast, function more like secrets or allegories.
In her most recent works, Mirchandani has shifted from the domestic spaces that once prevailed in her compositions to embrace the wildness of lush forests and natural environments, where the female body seems to return to a more primordial, animistic connection to the natural elements that characterize the female spirit.
One painting in particular, The Promise (2024), now on view at the FLAG Art Foundation, marked a major turning point in her representation of space. She recalls spending hours painting a chair, only to realize the act had become psychologically charged. At the time, she had recently moved to New York, left her marriage and was living in an Airbnb. “I was very destabilized, and I still am quite nomadic. I realized I had a deep anxiety and scarcity around domestic space,” she acknowledged. Returning to the family archive while grappling with her obsession over the chair, she understood what had trickled down. “My mother’s mother lived in a refugee house when she first arrived, and it took a long time for the family to get their own home. Even my mother grew up in multiple homes. As a group of women in the family, we have a very anxious attachment to domestic space. We are afraid it could disappear at any moment.”
Painting the chair became a conscious self-soothing exercise, a way to create permanence within a painting. From there, she began to ask whether she could produce the same feeling of safety, agency and comfort without relying on the domestic interior. This led to the “jungle paintings,” in which the body is placed in raw, untamed nature, free of man-made architecture or objects. At first, her bodies still moved through threshold spaces before fully entering the jungle imagery that also appears in paintings like Shifting Tides (2024). “Nature is the primordial sense of place. Especially for displaced communities, when you do not have homes or heirloom objects, what is home? What is belonging? It can be anywhere,” Mirchandani reflected. Between rivers, waterfalls and desert flora, memory, lineage and identity flow and expand beyond the confines of domesticity and individuality.
This thinking also informed her show “My Body Was A River Once,” on view through August 23 at ICA San Jose. Focused on the natural world, the exhibition sees female bodies fluidly merge and blend with the environment through symbolically charged storytelling that moves between silk organza paintings, wooden sculptures, glass-and-wood thorns and a multi-channel sound installation. In her exercise in world-building and myth-making, Mirchandani now moves confidently across media, engaging with techniques and materials that often link back to her homeland’s devotion to craft and to the history of global exchanges and trade it participated in, which helped shape today’s habits.
Her silk organza works emerged from a particular moment in the family archive. Her grandmother once described her childhood home in Pakistan, and Mirchandani and her mother tried to reconstruct a blueprint from those memories. “My grandmother was describing her childhood home in Pakistan, saying, ‘Then you go through this room, then the main room,’ and my mother and I sat down and made a blueprint of the house. It made no sense. But she was 13 when she left, so that was what she saw in her memory,” Mirchandani said. This made her question whether what she had been gathering was even an archive. “There are some photographs, but there are not many documents. It is a living, unstable place of myth, imagination and memory. It is myth-making.” Organza, with its translucency and layered presence, became a material capable of evoking that instability: the constantly mutable sense of reality between memory and imagination that compensates for its losses and gaps.
Her next goal is to develop movable, framed works on wheels, envisioning a space filled with layers of imagery that viewers could push and pull into new configurations—an action that perfectly echoes the way memory works: pushing something away, retrieving something from the filing cabinet of the mind, recombining fragments. Meanwhile, for a Ford Foundation show opening in September, Mirchandani is working on new paintings, silk works and large ceramic vessels from which the silks will emerge. She is making the vessels at All About Clay in Midtown and plans to mount them high on the wall to take advantage of the Ford Foundation’s vertical space.
When, toward the end of our conversation, we asked where the drive to collect family stories, build this archive and rework it through interweaving narratives comes from, Mirchandani acknowledged both communal and personal motivations. On the collective level, it is tied to the Sindhi experience of Partition and to a vast exodus that remains insufficiently discussed. “It is about understanding that history, because we did not learn much about it in school,” she said, explaining how, although Partition appears in Indian textbooks, its emotional and familial dimensions are rarely excavated. “It is about giving a name to this huge exodus that a community faced and that is not shared widely enough,” she added, noting how many people approach her after seeing the work to say their own families were affected as well.
On a more personal level, building this archive makes her feel less alone. Where she had once seen herself as the person breaking the family mold by becoming an artist, the archive revealed that the women before her had also broken social constructs in different ways, making her own path possible. “I realized that all of these women in my family were so badass. Each one had to break a social construct in her own way for me to be doing what I am doing.”
More in Artists