Divya was born in New Delhi, India and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She works primarily in oil painting and collage. Her work focuses on representations of brown women as a way to claim space in visual culture.
She studied painting at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, and studied fashion design at Parsons The New School in New York City.
CONTACT: divyaakhouri@gmail.com
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work is about perception and identity.
I begin by collecting imagery from art history, fashion, film, and popular media and build upon themes related to identity, beauty, and what makes us human. Drawing upon my experience, I create amalgamations of found imagery and self observation. In this body of work, I appropriate images of white women, replacing them with iterations of myself as a way of reclaiming power. The resulting work is the meeting point of my experience as an Indian immigrant in a society built on Eurocentric ideals. My goal is to confront myself and the viewer in the many ways that the bodies and identities of women of color have been colonized.