In ‘From the Edge of the Horizon’, the Eritrean-born artist traces the entangled histories of movement, colonialism and belonging across photography, video, sculpture and installation. Speaking to ART AFRICA, Petros reflects on opacity, displacement and the limits of what images can reveal.
1 July 2026
For more than two decades, Dawit L. Petros has developed a practice that interrogates the visual and political infrastructures shaping migration, identity and historical memory. Spanning photography, video, sculpture, and installation, his work examines how colonial histories continue to inform contemporary experiences of movement and belonging while challenging the assumptions embedded in acts of looking.
‘From the Edge of the Horizon’, presented across Remai Modern and the College Art Galleries in Saskatoon, brings together works produced over twenty-two years. Rather than offering definitive narratives, the exhibition lingers in the spaces between departure and arrival, visibility and concealment, personal history and collective experience. Petros reflects on the horizon as both a geographic and an imaginative condition, the ethics of representation, and the enduring questions that continue to shape his practice.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: Throughout ‘From the Edge of the Horizon’, the horizon feels both physical and emotional. How has your understanding of the horizon changed over time, especially in relation to migration and displacement?
Dawit L Petros: The horizon has never been just a line for me; it has always been a condition. In this exhibition, the horizon is where colonial and contemporary histories of displacement meet. It functions as both a site and a marker. The works create connections between local geographies and global histories. In doing so, they ask how we see and interpret horizons and borders, whether real or imagined, and how these perceptions form individual and collective identities. The horizon is especially significant in relation to migration and displacement. It marks the limit of what is visible and the prospect of what might be. Many of the histories and communities underpinning my work have looked toward horizons geographic, political, and imaginative, without any guarantee of arrival. My aim is to stay with that feeling of suspension, rather than resolve it.
Your work across photography, video, sculpture and installation often focuses on how we look and what we choose to see. What interests you about the politics of visibility?
Visibility is never neutral. What is seen, by whom, under what conditions, and through which apparatus are political questions that precede aesthetic considerations. I am interested in how certain bodies, landscapes, and histories have been made hyper- visible in ways that reduce their complexity, while others have been rendered invisible through systematic neglect. Photography maintains a complex relationship with both of these processes. I remain attentive to the question of what it means to look with intention. This attentiveness leads me to resist the apparent ‘ease’ of the image, to consider what a photograph cannot capture, and to engage with the space of that incompleteness.
Your work resists fixed ideas of identity and belonging. While putting together this exhibition, how did you balance personal history with broader collective experiences?
Fixed notions, particularly regarding identity and belonging, are fundamentally opposed to both my work and the methodologies I employ. I deliberately ensure that, although my work and research are shaped by personal history, this influence does not constrain the scope of the work. At the same time, I remain sceptical of work that appeals to collective experience without acknowledging the specific perspective from which it originates. My ongoing challenge is to maintain transparency about navigating between these two positions. My experiences and background as an Eritrean and as someone who has lived in multiple countries inevitably inform my work. However, these aspects serve as points of entry rather than final destinations. The questions I pursue extend beyond my individual experience.
Saskatoon played an important role in your artistic development. What does it mean to return to the city with an exhibition that reflects on movement, memory and belonging?
Saskatoon is where many elements of my visual language were formed. It is where I learned to view landscape not as a mere backdrop, but as a site that holds history and bears the residue of decisions about land and belonging made long before my arrival. However, this formation was not solely artistic. My family arrived there as refugees in the early 1980s, so the city shaped my personal, intellectual, and artistic development simultaneously, and these strands are not easily separated. The exhibition assembled works created over twenty-two years and presented them to my family, extended community, and friends, many of whom had never experienced the work in person. That proximity was meaningful. It shifted the nature of the encounter, making it more than an institutional event. When work that has travelled widely through galleries, biennials, and international contexts returns to the place where its necessity first emerged, a certain clarity arises. The distance the work has travelled and the journey my family undertook to arrive in Saskatoon become intertwined within the same narrative.
In works like The Stranger’s Notebook, migration is approached with subtlety and care rather than spectacle. How do you avoid reducing these experiences to simple narratives of crisis?
I begin from the fact that the people whose lives I am engaging have full, complex lives that aren’t reducible to their displacement or their movement. Crisis narratives tend to fix people so they are legible to an outside audience, and that legibility frequently comes at the cost of the person’s interiority. One of the guiding motivations for The Stranger’s Notebook was to “speak nearby” others without appropriating another’s voice. The men I photographed along the Mediterranean routes in Tangier, Catania, Nouakchott were en route, in transit, oriented toward something beyond the frame. What I wanted to preserve was precisely that orientation: the sense that their lives extended far beyond the encounter with my camera.
Many of your portraits partially hide or obscure the subject. What draws you to ‘withholding’ as a visual strategy?
Concealment, for me, is not withholding; it is a refusal of a particular kind of claim. The direct portrait carries an implicit presumption: that the camera can access the person, that the face is the primary site of legibility, that looking constitutes knowing. I am sceptical of all of that because not everything needs to be given over to the photograph. What I am interested in is not what the photograph can capture, but what it cannot and whether that remainder can be made felt. That gap, that insufficiency, is where I think the most honest work happens.
Your work often connects colonial histories to systems of mapping, movement and infrastructure. What does photography allow you to explore about these histories?
Photography is implicated in these histories; it is part of the apparatus of colonial documentation, classification, and control. Working with the medium means working with and against that legacy simultaneously. What interests me is photography’s presumed relationship to reality, its claim to record what was actually there, and how that claim has been deployed to authorise versions of history. I use the medium to ask what it registered, what it missed, and what it actively suppressed.
The exhibition is presented across two institutions rather than a single space. How did that shape the way you thought about storytelling and the audience’s experience of the work?
The two-venue structure, the Remai Modern and College Art Galleries, became structural to the work’s argument. Migration and displacement are not experienced as a single continuous narrative; they are fragmented across time and geography. The audience’s movement between institutions became a compressed version of the movement the work itself enacts. The work does not resolve into a single view from any one position, and the exhibition’s spatial and locational architecture makes that legible without stating it directly.
This exhibition was on view at Remai Modern and College Art Galleries from 5 September 5 2025 until 8 March 2026.
