TORONTO.- The Image Centre presents a major survey of Montreal-based artist Dawit L. Petros, winner of the 2025 Scotiabank Photography Award—one of Canada’s most prestigious honours recognizing outstanding contributions to contemporary photography. On view at the IMC (33 Gould Street, Toronto) from May 6 through August 1, 2026, the exhibition spans more than two decades of Petros’s practice and features over 60 photographs and serigraphs.

Tracing the legacies of colonial history across Africa, Europe, and North America, the exhibition highlights Petros’s research-driven approach. Drawing on extensive travel, his layered artworks combine archival photographs, colour interventions, and minimalist compositions to question photography’s documentary authority and challenge outdated historical narratives.

“Over the past two decades, Petros has emerged as a leading voice in contemporary photography,” says IMC Curator Gaëlle Morel. “His work examines photography’s role in shaping historical narratives while addressing displacement, global migration, colonial memory, and belonging—themes that feel especially resonant today, as migration is central in public discourse and cultural institutions reassess their colonial archives.”

“Movement is a defining feature of my own biography,” says Petros, who was born in Eritrea. “It’s meant that my own histories come into contact with communities and individuals who are also in movement around the world. And so, it’s this shared condition that is central to who I am and how I see.”

The exhibition presents portraits, landscapes, and explorations of colour and abstraction from 2004 to the present, offering a comprehensive view of Petros’s practice. Monumental wall-mounted panels, vibrant abstractions, and reworked colonial photographs showcase his distinctive approach to image-making.

The exhibition includes recent artworks from the series Spectral Fragments, which focuses on the Teleferica Massaua–Asmara cableway, a vast transport system built in Eritrea in 1937 during Italian colonial rule. Large wall-mounted panels combine archival photographs with etched smoked plexiglass to evoke the scale and legacy of this monumental infrastructure. While celebrated as an engineering achievement, the cableway also enabled colonial control and resource extraction in East Africa. By fragmenting and fading the original images, Petros creates ghostlike forms that reflect the erasures embedded in this history and suggest how aging technologies continue to carry traces of empire.

In the series Between Departures, Returns and Excesses of Image, Petros reworks archival images of Eritrean and Ethiopian warriors made by Italian colonial photographers during the 1930s, isolating the figures against solid colour blocks to expose how these stereotypical pictures were used to create romanticized, homogeneous representations.

For the ongoing project Chrome (pictured at very top), the artist photographs the textures and colours of different cities, translating them into swatches of flat colour and multihued geometric grids. Using conceptual strategies, Petros creates an abstract and poetic likeness of place rather than a literal documentary image.

Dawit Petros (b. 1972) is a visual artist, researcher, and educator born in Asmara, Eritrea and based in Montreal. Recent exhibitions include presentations at the Remai Modern and the University of Saskatchewan’s College Art Galleries, Saskatoon (2025) and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2024). In 2021, Petros received the Duke and Duchess of York Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts. He is currently Associate Professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth College, NH, and is represented by Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal, and Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK.