The Answers Take Time
(Minor Matters/sepiaEYE, 2022)
8 x 9.5 inches
~75 black and white and color images Hardcover, 112 pages
$50 plus shipping, deadline June 25 to achieve 500 pre-sales
sepiaEYE will partner with Minor Matters to release Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s first monograph The Answers Take Time.
This midcareer survey of Annu Palakunnathu Matthew visualizes 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 (b. 1964, Stourport-on-Severn, United Kingdom; lives in Rhode Island) recent solo exhibitions the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada, the Newport Art Museum, and Nuit Blanche, Toronto; her work has also been exhibited at the Newark Art Museum, MFA Boston, San Jose Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London and the Smithsonian.
She has been featured in international festivals including the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 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, and has been selected for the prestigious Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo and MacDowell residencies. Matthew is a Professor of Art at the University of Rhode Island.