Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s photo-based artwork combines still and moving imagery using photography, video, sculpture, and sound, often beginning with a personal experience and evolving into larger collaborations with others to reveal lesser-known histories. Her work re-examines historical narratives in both the United States and South Asia, draws on archival photographs to examine concepts of memory and to re-examine historical narratives and the legacies of colonization. Amongst Matthew’s projects, she will discuss her recent work exploring ignored and unheard stories from India’s past. This includes Open Wound - Stories of Partition, utilizing photo-animation, installation and the work of The 1947 Partition Archive to address missing voices and the turmoil experienced by those who were displaced by the British India Partition; and The Unremembered - Indian Soldiers of World War II, a multimedia installation acknowledging the the complete erasure of contributions of Indian soldiers who volunteered to take up arms for their British colonial rulers. Matthew will parse out the confluence of factors that played a role in this history complicated by Partition. Though trained as a photographer, her work increasingly uses the ever-expanding digital toolbox and has moved into installations. The result is a blend of still and moving imagery that shifts the viewer's perspective to question established and marginalized histories.
Annu Palakunnathu Matthew is a Providence-based visual artist, photographer, Professor of Art at the University of Rhode Island, and former Director of the Center for the Humanities 2013-2019 and 2015-17 Silvia-Chandley Professor of Nonviolence and Peace Studies. Born in England, raised in India, Matthew describes herself as “transcultural, living between cultures.” Her larger work draws on archival photographs to confront the colonial archive to re-examine its historical narrative legacies in both the US and South Asia. Matthew's has been an artist-in-residence at the Anderson Ranch, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Civitella Ranieri, Lightwork, Yaddo, and MacDowell, including support funded by MacColl Johnson, John Gutmann, two Fulbright Fellowships, and the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts. Matthew’s recent solo exhibitions include the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada, Nuit Blanche Toronto, Newport Art Museum, and sepiaEYE, NYC. Matthew has also exhibited her work at the RISD Museum, Newark Art Museum, MFA Boston, San Jose Museum of Art, MFA Houston, Victoria & Albert Museum , 2018 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2018 Fotofest Biennial, 2009 Guangzhou Photo Biennial, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art.
Presented by THAD-H258 Narrative Interventions: Hidden Histories in Museums and Archives, Liberal Arts Division. Support for this lecture series provided by The RISD Humanities Fund.