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Anoushka Mirchandani On the Body as Personal and Familial Archive

In works shaped by the Partition of India, matrilineal memory and diasporic experiences, she considers identity as porous, layered and constantly in motion.

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.

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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" Artist: Anoushka Mirchandani Venue: The FLAG Art Foundation Address: 545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY Through: July 31, 2026

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........

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