Anoushka Mirchandani: My Body Was A River Once
Anoushka Mirchandani: My Body Was A River Once
Institute of Contemporary Art San José · San José, CA · January 16–August 23, 2026
As a frequent collaborator of prolific artist Anoushka Mirchandani, Harlem Frames was presented with the distinct opportunity to custom-frame My Body Was A River Once, Mirchandani’s debut institutional exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José.
Curated by Zoë Latzer and comprising entirely Mirchandani’s new work, the exhibition continued to reconcile Mirchandani's tense examination of memory, migration, matrilineage, and the arbitrary and dwindling sense of belonging. Clear across this multimedia exhibit, composed of paintings, silks, sculptures, sounds, and scents, the artist challenges and reconciles the relationship between the body and the environments that encumber it. She aspires to understand how place, ancestry, and displacement contribute to the evolution and questionable fortitude of our identity.
The Exhibition
In My Body Was A River Once, Mirchandani mobilizes her recurring, elegantly phantasmic female figures beyond the domestic environments of previous works and instead transplants them into landscapes of waterfalls, flora, stone, and tree bark. Bodies amalgamate with their chosen surroundings, cultivating fluid spaces in which the boundaries between figure and landscape begin to dissolve into a confluence of rebirth.
Deriving inspiration from the Apsaras, the celestial divinities of water and movement articulated in Hindu and Buddhist tradition, Mirchandani employs these figures to investigate the concept and inheritance of intergenerational memory and the migration of ancestral stories across places and generations in the diaspora.
The exhibition serves as a demarcation of Mirchandani evolving material practice. Works on canvas sit adjacent to diaphanous silks, sculptural wooden forms, and sensory elements, nurturing an environment informed by transformation, lineage, nature, and the perennial search for belonging.
Framed by Harlem Frames
For My Body Was A River Once, Harlem Frames created Mirchandani’s signature custom natural walnut float frames, continuing a framing and fitting collaboration that cemented our friendship.
The float construction creates a considered space between the edge of the canvas and the surrounding walnut, allowing the full painted surface—and the physical presence of each canvas—to remain visible. The natural walnut texture is nothing short of exquisite and smooth. The wood adds a natural warmth and subtlety, ensuring the frame retains a restrained profile as it elegantly embraces Mirchandani's compositions.
That relationship between artwork and frame material was particularly suited to this exhibition. As Mirchandani's paintings bridge the connections between body, land, memory, and the organic natural world, the innate character of the walnut supplies us with a peaceful material that complements the elemental thematics of the artist’s work without interrupting her visual language.
The resulting frames are intended to accentuate the pre-existing definition of Mirchandani’s paintings within the exhibition space. Again, the goal is to never outcompete the work, but to elevate the presentation while allowing the excellence of the work enough room to breathe.
For Harlem Frames, the project reflects the importance of a timeless frame, and perhaps more importantly, finding what fits the client and their needs first. You’d be surprised how loyal you become to a frame when it transforms the reception of the work itself for the better. When working closely with any artist, framing becomes integral to an artist's evolving visual vernacular. This deliberate framing process is developed by understanding the artist’s intention, as much as it about familiarizing oneself with the aesthetics of the work, materials, scale, and the environments in which the work will ultimately be experienced.
Harlem Frames is proud to continue its collaboration with Anoushka Mirchandani and to have had a humble hand in presenting the works in My Body Was A River Once at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José.
Framed with Care, In Harlem.
Artist: Anoushka Mirchandani
Exhibition:My Body Was A River Once
Institution: Institute of Contemporary Art San José
Curator: Zoë Latzer
Exhibition Dates: January 16–August 23, 2026
Framing: Natural walnut float frames by Harlem Frames
Explore the exhibit:
https://www.icasanjose.org/uncategorized/anoushkamirchandanipressrelease/
