Before releasing a new album and presenting new artwork at India's first biennial, the London-born artist Mathangi Maya Arulpragasm – better known by her stage name MIA – went through a period of collection and reflection in advance of the release of her self-titled book.

The book went out 23 October and is a bright, art-driven survey of the five years that cover the production and release of her three LPs: Arular, Kala and Maya.

To assemble its technicolor pages, she had to dig around the relics of her career to assemble a cohesive narrative using her filmed, painted and digitized creations after years of whirlwind touring and controversy-generating.

"Two-thousand eleven was just a period of outputting what I already had and just sort of organizing it," Maya told the Guardian. "It just felt important to me because I don't have a space that's always constant or a situation that's always constant. I don't know, I feel like I'm in therapy."

Part of that organizational process involved taking 20 years of her film footage and handing it over to a producer friend who is working on a documentary about MIA. She gave the friend boxes of film without reviewing it and agreed to have no control over the project.

"It is what it is," she said. "I'm not ashamed of that shit, and I don't feel like I've got anything to hide."

The film has an indeterminate release date, courtesy her mysterious, artsy friend, and MIA has seen three minutes of a trailer. She saw that small chunk of the film so long ago that the finished documentary will be a mystery to its subject.

"When you see it is gonna be when I see it," she said.

The film will likely examine the rapper's migratory personal life and its impact on her similarly mobile career.

At six months old MIA left England for her parents' native Sri Lanka. She lived there and in India while her father campaigned for a separate Tamil state. His political activism forced the family back to London where Maya would eventually attend college at Saint Martins College of Art and Design. The prestigious school counts English artistic legends including Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney as alumni.

Eleven years after entering the school mid-term, she had become a world-famous and critically adored rapper who performed with Jay-Z and Kanye West while pregnant at the Grammys. She had a period of rest in 2011, but now she is back to bouncing around the globe with the forthcoming documentary, a soon-to-be-released album and an art show at India's first biennial.

"I've never had a thing, a space where I collected my souvenirs or tour stage passes – I don't have any of that stuff and so when I got off the tour bus in 2011 or something, January, February, I was just like shit – I've just been going and going and going and I'm moving back to England and I still don't have anything and I am moving into a space that's a white room and completely empty and I didn't own a single thing."

She said before she could advance her artistic career, it was important to study her history and assure her past work was consistent to help believe in the next steps of her career.

"I think it's just basically reviewing the stuff you've done in some sort of documented form and it sort of clears your mind to make space for what you want to do next," she said. "It's been a really good process of cleaning out the closet, basically, and making space for some new thoughts."

She is keeping most of the new thoughts under wraps as she focuses on promoting the book and the work it represents, but did say the book is not as focused on technology as her most recent studio album /\/\ /\ Y /\.

"This one is more about finding something beautiful in a lot of ugly stuff and that's like the basic thing, it can be done through whatever, it's not technology-dependent," she said. "It's just kind of giving people the power to find beauty in just shitiness."

At the cusp of the next stage of her career, she'll be presenting new art at India's Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, on 12 December 2012 in Kerala. Whether or not she'll be performing at the biennial is still in discussion, but she definitely has a handful of shows lined up in Australia and is hoping to tour next year.

On Sunday, a day before leaving for India, Maya spoke in New York at the Museum of Modern Art's PS1 branch in Queens to discuss the production of the book with her fans.

Maya plugged in each of the three laptops used to produce her albums and showed previously unseen images and videos from the beginning of her career.

She also shared an image that represents her new album, Mathangi, which has been pushed back from a previously announced December release.

The image was a collage of internet searches, bright green imagery and icons representing the artist and was greatly influenced by her newfound spirituality, which she discovered on the internet.

When she searched "Mathangi," her first name, on Google India, the top result was a Hindu goddess she didn't know about, and then herself.

"She basically is the god of spoken word, or rap music, or whatever the thing was 5,000 years ago," she told the audience. "So she lived on the outskirts of mainstream society and fought for information, so her whole existence is based on the purity of information."

The goddess' mantra also happens to be aim, which is MIA backwards, and her mudra is the middle finger, something Maya also can relate to. She made the middle finger gesture during a performance at the Super Bowl in February. The act was broadcast to a television audience of 152 million.

When an audience member at PS1 asked about the incident, she said it would be addressed on the new album.

• This story was updated on 6 November to correctly locate PS1 in Queens, not Brooklyn.