Annu Palakunnathu Matthew: The Answers Take Time

Annu Palakunnathu Matthew: The Answers Take Time by Aline SmithsonApril 10, 2022

©Annu Palakunnathu Matthew

For the past several months, we have been featuring Photo Book Publishers on Lenscratch in our Publisher’s Spotlight series. Each publisher has a unique approach to publishing, raising funds, and working with photographers. Photographer Annu Palakunnathu Matthew is working with Minor Matter Books, in collaboration with sepiaEYE, to publish the book, The Answers Take Time.

Minor Matters Books must achieve 500 pre-sales by June 25, 2022 to go to print. To purchase go here.

Minor Matters states about the book:

This mid-career survey of Annu Palakunnathu Matthew elucidates the progression of a conceptual, installation-driven artist who uses photography, collage, digital animation, parody, and ephemera to explore performative and deep-rooted personal elements of cultural identities. From her highly-publicized series “Indian from India” to the lesser-seen “Bollywood Satirized,” the book reveals within her work consistent themes of malleability, identity, and memory.

Informed by her perspective as a global citizen who has been a resident of three continents, the book’s sequence is its own journey through geographies and time, influenced by the irrefutable narratives of population displacement, and the imperfection of memories. Her photo-based installation work is a blend of still and moving imagery, often drawing on archives of professional portraiture and of personal photographs to elucidate similarities beneath assumed surface differences.

Matthew investigates identities she exists within, and outside of, finding ways to inhabit others’ stories so that they are heard and seen. Probing the impact of America’s dual position as colony and colonizer, her work expands what is considered to be American history in the country she now calls home.

©Annu Palakunnathu Matthew

Annu Palakunnathu Matthew (b. 1964, Stourport-on-Severn, United Kingdom; lives in Rhode Island) has had solo exhibitions at the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada, the Newport Art Museum, and Nuit Blanche, Toronto. Her work has also been exhibited at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Newark Art Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

She has been featured in international festivals including the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kerala, India, 2018, the Fotofest Biennial, Houston, Texas, 2018, and the 2009 Guangzhou Photo Biennial, China. She is a recipient of the John Guttman Fellowship, two Fullbright fellowships, and grants from the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts, among others. She has been selected for the prestigious Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Yaddo, and MacDowell residencies.

Matthew is a Professor of Art at the University of Rhode Island; she is represented by sepiaEYE, New York.