The Strangers Notebook (2016-2017) the project which formed Petros’ debut solo show with Tiwani Contemporary, in 2016, emerged from a thirteen-month journey the artist made across Africa and Europe. It addressed the West’s limited knowledge of extensive cross-border flows and diasporas within the African continent. Spazio Disponibile, (2019-2020), Italian for “available spaces”, examined connections and patterns of movement in the interconnected material histories of Eritrea, Italy, and Canada. Prospetto a Mare (2021-Present) expands the implications of this North American, European and North American configuration by adding the itineraries of Alitalia - Fascist Italy’s civil airline - and the trans-Atlantic crossings of General Italo Balbo. Prospetto a Mare uses photography, video, and sound to examine the powerful role that aviation technologies played in the construction of Italy’s colonial vision.
Dawit L. Petros: Recollections draws from and extends the third in this trio of projects. In this exhibition selected works highlight colonial publications that the artist has been collecting since 2010 - maps, aeronautic manuals, postcards, and photographs. These are reimagined and converted into multi-scalar works across an array of media. A monumental mural manifests an imperial structure in unstable, ambiguous ways. A wall sculpture proposes a form for contested territorial claims. Performative, staged photographs juxtapose subjects with charged, symbolic landscapes. These acts of appropriation and transformation are gestures of cultural and ideological resistance intended to reveal the ambiguities and dissonances inherent to colonial documents.
Petros’ aesthetics are anchored on the visual syntax of abstraction. The language of the exhibition brings together highly representational images - for example, a photograph of a figure in the landscape, or a mural of a crane - in proximity to spare iconography (serigraphs, a sculpture). Abstraction and figuration are posited in open, unresolved tensions that point towards pluralities of readings. Furthermore, the restrained visual forms pose questions about aesthetic beauty and what kind of visual language is most appropriate for analyzing charged colonial histories.
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About the artist
Dawit L. Petros is a visual artist born in Eritrea and based in Chicago and Montreal. Working with installation, photography, research and extensive travels, his practice centres around a critical re-reading of the relationship between African histories and European modernism. In recent projects, he employs abstraction as an act of translation to push against naturalised ways of understanding form, colour and subjectivity. By drawing upon forms rooted in diverse histories, Petros' artistic language enables a metaphorically rich articulation of the fluidity of contemporary transnational experiences and attendant issues of displacement, place-making and cultural negotiation. He holds an MFA in Visual Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University, Boston, a BFA in Photography from Concordia University, Montreal, and a BA in History from the University of Saskatchewan.
