Lecture in Photography: Dawit L. Petros

Note: this lecture has been rescheduled from Oct 16 to NOVEMBER 13, 6–7:30

(Ferguson Lecture Hall)

Dawit L. Petros is a visual artist, researcher and educator and his solo exhibition, Prospetto a Mare, is on view at MoCP from August 30-December 20, 2024.

Visual artist and researcher Dawit L. Petros is currently associate professor in the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Petros completed the Whitney Independent Study Program, an MFA in visual art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, a BFA in photography from Concordia University, and a BA in history from the University of Saskatchewan. A recipient of awards including a Terra Foundation Research Fellowship, the Paul De Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award for Art Photography and a Fulbright Fellowship, Petros’s multidisciplinary work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, London; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City; and the Bamako Biennale, Mali, among other venues.

His work is informed by studies of global modernisms, theories of diaspora, and postcolonial studies. Throughout the past decade, he has focused on a critical re-reading of the entanglements between colonialism and modernity. These concerns derive from lived experiences: Petros is an Eritrean emigrant who spent formative years in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Kenya before settling in central Canada. The overlapping cultures, voices, and tenets of this constellation produced a dispersed consciousness, global and transnational in stance and outlook. His works aim for an introspective and textured analysis of the historical factors that produced these migratory conditions. Petros installs photographs, moving images, sculptural objects, and sound work according to performative, painterly, or site responsive logics. Moving between the works echoes the extensive travel taken to produce them; while recurrent visual or formal devices quietly indicate the complex backdrops against which his projects are set.

Lectures in Photography are co-presented by MoCP and the Photography Department of Columbia College Chicago.

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