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Title:	Dawit L. Petros: Prospetto a Mare
Date:	8/30/2024 - 12/20/2024
Address:	Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, 600 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60605
Location:	Chicago, IL
Hours:	Monday - Saturday: 10:00am – 5:00pm / Sunday 12:00pm – 5:00pm / Thursday 10:00am. – 8:00pm
Cost/Cover:	free
Web Page:	https://www.mocp.org/exhibition/prospetto-a-mare/
Contact Info:	312.663.5554

Details:

Nestled in a green space between Soldier Field and Lake Michigan, the often-forgotten Balbo Monument was gifted to the city of Chicago by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini to commemorate controversial air marshal Italo Balbo’s 1933 transatlantic flight from Italy to Chicago during the city’s World’s Fair. Prospetto a Mare is the latest chapter of Eritrea-born artist Dawit L. Petros’s long-term investigation of the impact of Italian colonialism and its subsequent imprint on the visual cultures, populations and built environments of Africa, Europe and North America. With particular attention to Chicago’s buried links to Italian colonialism, Petros probes the propaganda used to promote Italy’s colonial projects in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Libya, and by extension, the newly formed Italian state; the (aerial) technologies used to dominate occupied countries and simultaneously extol the power of the occupiers; and the imperfect ways in which these histories are inscribed in public and private memory through monuments, storytelling, archives, and photography. By incisively deconstructing established narratives of culture, migration, and power, Prospetto a Mare reminds us that the tendrils of the past reach into the present, emphasizing that history remains unfixed and unfinished.