NOW Live from the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center

by Priya Chhaya

Over the course of the next year, we’ll be doing monthly interviews with some of the contributors to the exhibition. Our hope is to go beyond the artwork and objects in the physical space for more stories, and more about Indian-Americans that shaped the nation. To kick things off, I interviewed Annu Palakunnathu Matthew the artist behind an “Indian from India.” Matthew is Professor of Art (Photography) and Director of the Center for the Humanities at the University of Rhode Island.

1. Tell us a little about yourself. How did you become an artist?

My undergraduate degree was in Mathematics! I studied in India where you can’t change your major. At my college in Chennai, we had the choice of taking an optional subject, and I got into a photography class. My memory is that the class shared one camera and two rolls of film for the whole semester! I fell in love.

My work continually draws on my experience and consequences of living between cultures as I was born in England, grew up in India and now live in the USA. My work addresses the political, social, transformative issues stemming from my transnational experience. These cultural “overlays” and shifts use a framework of visual juxtaposition and the construction of parallel realities, identities and histories.

2. What is your favorite piece in your collection and why?

Each of the images say something different. I like Red/Brown Indian as it conveys the idea of what I am trying to do right away. I also have a partiality to Mother and Daughter as it includes my daughter when she was young.

3. A lot of your work deals with old photographs and old places as vehicles for memory and history. What about that idea inspires you?

My larger body of work as a photographer is built on the illusion of veracity implied in most photographs. A lot of the work builds on photographs, often using popular media and historical imagery. As George Slade eloquently wrote in the magazine Black and White, “If Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s imagery looks back in time it is less romantic recollection of the past than a kind of bracing, corrective look at personal experiences and cultural behavior. Her work opens up the historical record, reframes what people see and presents new conclusions about the evidence she transcribed into her images.”

4. What are you hoping visitors will take from your series “Indian from India?”

In an Indian from India, I play on my own “otherness,” and use photographs of Native Americans from the Nineteenth Century that perpetuated and reinforced stereotypes.  The images highlight assimilation, use labels and make many assumptions. I pair these with self-portraits in clothes, poses and environments that mimic these “older” images.  The clothes I wear are also “made up”, similar to Edward Curtis’ contrived posing and dressing up of some of his subjects into clothes of tribes other than their own. The final paired images challenge the viewer’s assumptions of then and now, us and them, exotic and local.

5. Beyond Bollywood is all about looking past the stereotype and seeing the role of Indian Americans in the United States. If you had to describe Indian Americans today in two sentences or less, what would you say?  

I think we would refer ourselves now as South Asians as there are other countries in the region to which we have strong cultural ties with. Also, I think a hyphenated identity is becoming less relevant especially as the present minorities in the US become the majority by 2050.