USask, Remai Modern present work by Dawit L. Petros

The University of Saskatchewan (USask) has partnered with Remai Modern to showcase the work of Dawit L. Petros (BA’96), an artist, researcher, educator, and USask graduate who received the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Award earlier this year. 

From the Edge of the Horizon, a new exhibition presented in two parts at USask’s College Art Galleries and Remai Modern, traces the arc of Petros’ career, gathering works that chart his longstanding inquiry into geography, identity, and migration.  

“There’s photography, objects, sound, moving image, screenprints—it really is the breadth of how I’ve grown as an artist and my interests in various artistic medium,” Petros told the Green&White in a recent interview at the College Art Galleries. 

The exhibition opened in both locations on Sept. 5, with Petros visiting Saskatoon as the artworks were installed in the galleries and attending the opening event at Remai Modern on Sept. 4. The show brings together works that span 21 years of Petros’ practice across continents, histories, and collaborations. 

"We are delighted to present this expansive two-part survey as Dawit L. Petros’ first solo exhibition in Saskatoon,” said Leah Taylor (BFA’04), Curator, College Art Galleries. “This city is home to Petros’ family, and where he spent his formative years growing up and attending USask for his first degree, a BA in history. His multidisciplinary practice centres around a critical re-reading of the relationship between East African histories and European modernism.” 

Petros’ work is rooted in his lived experiences as an Eritrean emigrant who lived in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Kenya before settling with his family in Canada. He attended elementary and high school in Saskatoon before enrolling in USask’s College of Arts and Science in 1992 and subsequently earning his Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1996. 

“We are delighted to showcase and celebrate Dawit’s work at Remai Modern,” said Michelle Jacques, Head of Exhibitions & Collections/Chief Curator, Remai Modern. “As an artist, he has a deft ability to create works that are both visually stunning and thought-provoking. His upbringing in Saskatoon has given him enduring ties to the Prairies and, alongside the College Art Galleries, these two exhibitions showcase both his intimate connection with this place and his global vision. It is an honour to be involved in this project and to share so much of Dawit’s work with our visitors.”  

Petros, who currently lives and works in the U.S. and Canada and is an associate professor in the Department of Studio Art at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, also earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in visual art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University, as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in photography at Concordia University in Montreal. His artistic practice is informed by ideas and themes around movement, water, connection, community, ecology and environmental impact, history, capitalism, and colonialism. 

“I come from a background which has involved multiple relocations prior to coming to Canada, so the question of movement is vital—mobility, migration,” Petros said. 

“Colonialism, for me, is not a historical event; it’s a contemporary dynamic, which continues to shape events,” he added. 

Petros’ work has attracted international attention, and he has exhibited widely, with shows at the Tate Modern in London, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Bamako Biennale in Mali. He has been recognized with numerous accolades, including The Terra Foundation for American Art Research Fellow, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Paul De Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award in Art Photography, and an Art Matters Fellowship. In May 2025 Petros won the 15th annual Scotiabank Photography Award, which includes a $50,000 cash prize, a solo primary exhibition at The Image Centre, and a published book of his work distributed worldwide by the art book publisher Steidl. 

Petros said he doesn’t take such honours for granted, noting it “never ceases being a bit of a miracle.” As the first person in his family to attend university, he continues to recognize the “enormous sacrifices” of his parents and members of his community who have supported their children’s educational aspirations and careers, he said. 

“I didn’t come to art with the understanding that what has unfolded over the last 25 years is possible,” he said. “I don’t come from a community that deems it possible to operate within the creative sphere. Which is not to say that we’re not creative people; we came here as refugees and so our parents prioritized stable career paths for us.” 

From the Edge of the Horizon II, on view in the College Art Galleries, includes works from four major series: The Stranger’s Notebook, Spazio Disponibile, Reinscriptions, and As the Nile Flows and the Camel Walks (Petros’ newest work and an ongoing project). Petros said a significant aspect of the research and the beginnings of the project were initiated when he was an artist-in-residence at USask about two years ago. Work from The Stranger’s Notebook, meanwhile, is anchored in an extensive 13-month journey that Petros took from Nigeria to Sicily by road. Through The Stranger’s Notebook, Petros examines two key things. 

“The first was the absence of social awareness in the West that roughly 11, 12 million Africans move, migrate—but the majority of these people are moving within the continent itself,” he said. “So, part of The Stranger’s Notebook concern is to address the absence of the knowledge of intra-African diasporic mobility. Diasporic Africans are thought of largely as being outside of the continent. The second part is the movement of Africans from Africa into Europe.” 

Viewers will notice that some of Petros’ photographic work features subjects whose faces and identities are obscured. There became a point in Petros’ practice at which he stopped making portraits that revealed his subjects’ faces as he grappled with what it means “for black subjects within the context of certain forms of representation to exist as the site of spectacle,” he said. 

“I had to grapple with what it was that I didn’t want to show, and allowing my subjects to retain certain anonymity.” 

The oldest photographs featured in the exhibition are portraits that were printed between 2004 and 2005. They coincide with the time in Petros’ life when he was leaving Montreal after finishing his undergraduate studies in photography and beginning his graduate studies in the U.S. The portraits feature family and community members pictured in their North American front and backyards, at homes in Saskatoon, Boston, and Montreal. The portraits were inspired by Petros’ impulse to ground himself in new locations “through a set of people who would become community and who would become family,” he said. 

The portraits also grapple with the notion that members of Petros’ family dreamed of returning home to Eritrea once the war ended but remained living a different life in North America. 

“That dream of home is replaced by the North American dream of home ownership,” he said. “So, the way in which my community and my family becomes interwoven into the North American suburban environment and shifts the demographic, shifts the way in which it’s visualized—these are the kinds of concerns I had when I was making these portraits.”  

Another recurring motif in Petros’ work is water. He noted that “a significant aspect” of why his family relocated to Canada stemmed from conflicts over access to water, and as a result the geopolitical implications of water have been of particular interest to him for years. Water is also a metaphor for other inquiries and concerns in his work. 

“The sea for me is also the prairie—it’s the space; it’s the vastness,” he said. “The sea means many things—it means history, it means life, it means possibility.” 

For Petros, visiting the USask campus prior to the opening of From the Edge of the Horizon was an emotional experience. For him, the university symbolizes moving to Saskatoon as well as his first steps into academia and an intellectual awakening. 

“This university is really significant to my educational and intellectual development,” he said. “Walking the campus, the buildings facilitate an evocation of experiences and memories that I don’t immediately have access to because I’ve been away for long. So, it’s incredible.” 

USask also has family ties and community connections; Petros’ father and other family members worked as custodians at the university, and some continue to be employed at USask. Petros looks forward to them visiting his exhibition and viewing the portraits he’s created of them. 

“There’s all of that complexity,” he said. “This is where I went to school, but this is also where my family laboured in custodial roles and other extended family continues to work here. I want them to come and see themselves on these walls.” 

From the Edge of the Horizon II runs at USask’s College Art Galleries until Dec. 12, 2025. From the Edge of the Horizon 1 runs at Remai Modern, Saskatoon’s museum of modern and contemporary art, until March 8, 2026, in the Marquee Gallery.