Dawit L. Petros is a visual artist, researcher and educator whose study of history informs a sustained examination of displaced legacies and their contemporary effects. Over the past decade and a half, he has critically re-read 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, both global and transnational. His work is an introspective and textured analysis of the historical factors that produced migratory conditions. Petros installs photographs, moving images, sculptural objects and sound according to performative, painterly or site-responsive logics. The experience of moving through these installations echoes the extensive travel required to produce them, while recurrent visual and formal devices quietly indicate the complex backdrops of his projects.
