Dawit L. Petros

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 rereading 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.

Recent exhibitions include: University at Buffalo Art Galleries, New York (2020), The Power Plant, Toronto (2020), Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (2018), Bamako Biennale (2017), New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans (2017), Walther Collection Project Space, New York (2016); Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2016); Kansas City Art Institute (2016); 56th Venice Biennale international exhibition (2015), Tiwani Contemporary, London (2016) the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2014), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2014), the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC (2013), and the Lianzhou International Photo Festival, China (2011). He was awarded an Independent Study Fellowship at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012. In 2021 he received the title of Museum of Contemporary Photography Terra Foundation for American Art Fellow.