Dawit L. Petros. Spazio Disponibile

Galerie de l’UQAM presents Spazio Disponibile, a major exhibition by artist Dawit L. Petros initiated, organized, and circulated by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto) and curated by Irene Campolmi. Concluding its North American tour in Montreal, this project presents the artist’s vast field of research on the complex layers of colonial and post-colonial histories linking Eritrea, Italy, and Canada.

The exhibition

Dawit L. Petros presents a new body of work underlining the unexplored links between colonization, migrations and modernism. Spazio Disponibile – Italian for ‘Available Space’ – alludes to vacant advertising sections that appeared in Rivista Coloniale, a widely circulated early 20th century magazine and the official organ of the Italian colonial project. The title is also a reference to the colonial gaze that viewed the lands of Africa as available space to occupy and exploit its resources.

Petros has developed an expansive suite of works that reflect his research into the complex layers of colonial and postcolonial histories connecting East Africa and Europe. Employing archival materials collected over a period of seven years, he documents the Italian presence in Ethiopia and Eritrea between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The exhibition highlights the ties between the contemporary resurgence of nationalism and the suppressed but lingering memory of Italian colonization.

Extending the artist’s ongoing project, The Stranger’s Notebook—the result of a thirteen-month journey exploring mobilities within Africa and across the Mediterranean—to focus on built forms including architecture, the exhibition also addresses questions of labour, the pitfalls of nation building and intertwined narratives of migration. Examining parallels between African histories and European modernism, the artist investigates the manner in which objects operate as texts in the construction and transmission of cultural ideologies. Spazio Disponibile looks at how these objects obscure power differentials while connecting people across borders, binding disparate geographies such as Italy, Eritrea and Canada.

About the artist

Dawit L. Petros is a visual artist, researcher, and educator. Petros’ 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 as an Eritrean emigrant, having spent formative years in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Kenya before settling in central Canada. His work offers 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. Petros holds an MFA in visual art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University, a BFA in photography from Concordia University, and a BA in history from the University of Saskatchewan. Petros is a co-founder of the Black Athena Collective with artist Heba Y. Amin (EGY). He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Photography at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Petros is represented by Tiwani Contemporary in London, England, and Bradley Ertaskiran in Montreal, Canada.

dawitlpetros.com

About the curator

Irene Campolmi is a Copenhagen-based curator. Her current research investigates postcolonial, queer, and feminist theories through performance and hybrid artistic ecologies. In the past, her curatorial research and practice have focused on curatorial ethics. She has worked as an independent curator and a researcher for ten years within art museums and institutions across the world, including Musée d’art de Joliette (Canada), The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto, Canada), MAAT (Lisbon, Portugal), Copenhagen Contemporary (Denmark), MAH (Azores, Portugal), and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen, Denmark). She co-curated the Estonian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennial in which Birth V: Hi and Bye by Kris Lemsalu was featured. Currently, she’s employed at Copenhagen Contemporary as the curator and researcher of the exhibition and research project Yet, it Moves! and is working on the exhibition Realistic Utopias – An archive of the Future at KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces (Køge, Denmark). Since 2019, she is the Head Art Program and Curator of Enter Art Program, a publicly funded satellite program of performances and talks in conjunction with Enter Art Fair. Before joining the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen as a PhD Fellow (2013-2016), she worked as a researcher in the Max Planck Institute research group Objects in the Contact Zone: The Cross-Cultural Life of Things.

irenecampolmi.com

Support provided by