Anoushka Mirchandani's "My Body Was a River Once" at ICA

"The India-born, San Francisco-based artist Anoushka Mirchandani paints translucent female forms in various states of serenity, merging them with streams, waterfalls and rivers in fluid metamorphoses that blur the boundaries between body and land, between spatial travel and temporal travel. The ICA show, "My Body Was a River Once," is Mirchandani's first ever solo institutional show. With the help of oil paint, oil sticks and oil pastels,"

"Her paintings, she said, emerged from a years-long investigation into internal domestic spaces. "I remember at some point I was painting a wicker chair for like 60 hours and I was like, 'What is happening, what am I doing?'" she recalled. "And I went back to this archive that I've been building, which is an archive about my family and my grandparents who went through the Partition of India, really capturing oral history about their journey.""

Anoushka Mirchandani presents translucent female figures fused with streams, waterfalls and rivers to blur the boundaries between body and land and between spatial and temporal travel. The works employ oil paint, oil sticks and oil pastels and draw on Apsaras imagery from South Asian mythology, whose name evokes flowing movement in water. Oral histories from Mirchandani's grandmothers, who fled Pakistan during Partition, inform the paintings as vessels of intergenerational movement that carry ancestral stories. The series grows from an archive of family memory and sustained investigation into internal domestic spaces, and the gallery opening was crowded and animated.

Read at Metro Silicon Valley | Silicon Valley's Leading Weekly