Curated by Dr. Francine Weiss. For over twenty years, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew has been making photo-based works of art that deal with lesser-known histories and immigration. Born in England, raised in India, and now living in the United States, Matthew draws on her personal experience and identity and also collaborates to tell the stories of […]
Curated by Nathaniel Gaskell for MAP - Museum of Art & Photography
Curated by: Michele Cairella Fillmore
Abstract
Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s work “re-dresses” the legacies of nineteenth-century modes of imaging “Indians,” that is, both Native Americans and South Asian Americans. She honours the self-fashioning buried in nineteenth-century photographs of “native types” by restaging photographs with her own body, re-dressed in a construction of what an “Indian from India” is expected to be, all the while subtly pushing back at those expectations. For Matthew, photographs emerge as active participants in re-dressing and redressing the colonial and diasporic relation by demonstrating the ways in which Brown bodies continue to be forced into particular kinds of self-presentation; enacting the exhausting demand to assert oneself as Indian, American, human, legitimate, and belonging, and presenting these struggles as intimately linked to nineteenth-century legacies of representations of colonized, Brown bodies.