Annu Palakunnathu Matthew

Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s (b. 1964) photo-based artwork mines issues of identity, immigration, and inter-generational memory with the insights of a woman who has twice lived the immigrant experience. Matthew’s work takes advantage of the viewer’s uncertainty between the reality of photography and its manipulation through digital tools to get the viewer to reexamine and construct parallel histories.

Among Matthew’s solo exhibitions are the Royal Ontario Museum, Nuit Blanche Toronto, and sepiaEYE, NYC. Matthew also has exhibited her work at the RISD Museum (Providence), Newark Art Museum, MFA Boston, San Jose Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), 2018 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2018 FotoFest Biennial, 2009 Guangzhou Photo Biennial, and at the Smithsonian.

Grants and fellowships that have supported her work include a MacColl Johnson, John Guttman, two Fulbright Fellowships, and grants from the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts. In addition, Matthew has been an artist in residence at Yaddo and MacDowell.

As Holland Cotter of the New York Times wrote about her 2016 solo exhibition at sepiaEYE in New York, “…The mostly album-size photographs in this compact but far-ranging gallery survey are about the intensities and confusions of a cultural mixing that makes the artist, psychologically, both a global citizen and an outsider, at home and in transit, wherever she is. And it’s about photography as document and fiction: souvenir, re-enactment and imaginative projection. A beautiful show that could too easily slip away.”

Matthew is Professor of Art at the University of Rhode Island. She is represented by sepiaEYE, NYC.

Matthew was an attendee of the SPE / MNF Photo Education Symposium, 5-7.Jan.2020, in New Delhi. This bio was provided by the artist. A more comprehensive profile will be forthcoming.

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