Dawit L. Petros, Colourscape, Coordinate #5, (Dakar, Senegal), 2012, pigment print. Courtesy of the artist and Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal
The Image Centre presents Scotiabank Photography Award: Dawit L. Petros
May. 4, 2026
Survey exhibition explores photography, migration, and colonial legacies.
Toronto, May 4, 2026 — The Image Centre (IMC) 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.
The exhibition opens with a public reception on May 6, 2026, from 6–8 pm. The event is free and open to all, but Eventbrite registration is required. Tickets can be reserved here.
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colour interventions, and minimalist compositions to question photography’s documentary authority and challenge outdated historical narratives.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 plexiglas 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 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.
Other exhibitions on view include Larry Fink: Social Graces & Runway, Jessica Slipp: Becoming Rock, and Kenna Robinson: With My Whole Body.
Curated by Gaëlle Morel. Organized by The Image Centre, in partnership with Scotiabank.
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
Opening Reception
Spring/Summer Exhibitions
Wednesday, May 6, 6–8 pm
Eventbrite registration required
Artist and Curator in Conversation
Dawit L. Petros and Gaëlle Morel
Thursday, May 7, 7 pm
IMA-307 | Enter via The Image Centre
Eventbrite registration required
Exhibition Tour
Scotiabank Photography Award:
Dawit L. Petros
Wednesday, May 27, 6 pm
Led by Gaëlle Morel & Helen Tewolde
Exhibition Talk
Lucy Sante on Larry Fink
Wednesday, June 17, 7 pm
IMA-307 | Enter via The Image Centre
Eventbrite registration required
Student Gallery Opening Reception
Mursal Mohammadi: BAQĀ/بقا (The Unforgotten)
Wednesday, June 24, 6–8 pm
Exhibition Tour
Scotiabank Photography Award: Dawit L. Petros
Wednesday, July 15, 6 pm
Led by Gaëlle Morel
Events are free and take place at The Image Centre (33 Gould Street) unless otherwise noted.
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INFORMATION + IMAGES
Kristen Dobbin
Marketing, Communications and Public Relations Officer
The Image Centre
kristendobbin@torontomu.ca
Jill Anzarut
Director & Head Global Wealth Management Communications
Scotiabank
jill1.anzarut@scotiabank.com
ABOUT THE IMAGE CENTRE
The Image Centre (IMC) is Canada’s leading institution dedicated to the exhibition, research and collecting of photography. Established in 2012 at Toronto Metropolitan University, in the heart of the city, the IMC welcomes visitors to explore the intersection of photography and culture. Through compelling exhibitions and engaging public programming, the IMC showcases work by emerging, renowned, and anonymous photographers, past and present. With a growing collection of nearly 500,000 photographic objects and an innovative scholarly research program, the IMC is also a vibrant hub for the preservation and study of photography.
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