June 11 – December 6, 2025
Threads of Refuge
Works by Anthony GebrehiwotCurated by Thy Phu & Saaz Taher
Forced displacement transforms lives, intertwining visible and unseen strands of change into new narratives. Threads of Refuge explores these transformations, through intimate portraits by photographer Anthony Gebrehiwot, of refugees Shamso Elmi, Sahra Gelle, Mariam Manai, and Ezat Mossallanejad, each accompanied by their personal stories. These images invite viewers to reflect on the taut balance between honouring loss and embracing renewal, as individuals rebuild their lives in unfamiliar spaces, while clasping the fraying strands of memory, culture, and identity. Each portrait unveils the layered complexity of refugee experiences, where the anguish of displacement coexists with unwavering spiritual faith, aspiration for reinvention, and the hope of preserving ties to community. Threads of Refuge cultivates a space for reflection, encouraging audiences to engage with the textured realities of displacement. The exhibition shows how, even amid upheaval, refugees hold fast to heritage and faith, weaving intricate patterns of belonging that sustain them in ever-shifting landscapes.
About the Artist
Anthony Gebrehiwot is an award-winning artist and community leader whose creative lens re-visions photography as an ongoing dialogue of social change between subject and society. Gebrehiwot seeks to communicate without language in an intimate and vulnerable way: through his art, he portrays the vocabulary of race, masculinity, history, perception, and vulnerability. Combining contrasting landscapes, Black bodies, and raw human emotion, Gebrehiwot explores the affective power of Black bodies in confronting the viewer's humanity and empathy.
His artistic exploration stems from his work with Black/pan-African diaspora communities in Toronto. As the former resident photographer at R.I.S.E. Edutainment (Reaching Intelligent Souls Everywhere), Gebrehiwot has intimately witnessed and documented the creative and unguarded evolutions of poets, musicians, and artists from across the city. Based in Scarborough, Gebrehiwot has worked to bring photography to youth in communities through organizations like the NIA Centre, the Power Plant, the Doris Mccarthy Gallery and the Art Gallery of York University. His connection to youth and community, combined with his sustained self-dissection and constant desire to evolve, helped him to identify black identities as a focal topic for photographic inquiry.
About the Curators
Thy Phu is a Distinguished Professor of Race, Diaspora, and Visual Justice at the University of Toronto. Her research and curatorial work explore the intersections of photography, memory, and social justice. She is the author of Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam (Duke University Press, 2022), which provides a new visual history of the war in Vietnam by centring the perspectives of Vietnamese photographers. Her scholarship has been widely published in leading journals, and she has co-edited influential, including Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada and Cold War Camera. As a curator, she has contributed to exhibitions that bring overlooked photographic histories to broader audiences, including The Family Camera, Queering Family Photography, and the most recently, Visual Kinship, collaborative projects on personal photography, race, and migration. Her work invites audiences to reconsider how images construct histories, identities, and solidarities in the wake of fractured archives and in an era of digital transformation and global migration.
Saaz Taher is a postdoctoral researcher in critical refugee studies and digital storytelling at the Department of Arts, Culture and Media. She works for the Refugee States, a collaborative and community-based project funded by a SSHRC Race, Gender and Diversity Initiative grant. Her research examines the intersections between media and intercultural communication studies, migration and refugee studies, and critical race and feminist epistemologies of the Global South. She is the coeditor of the collective book Les Défis du Pluralisme: Au-delà des frontières de l’altérité (2018, Presses de l’Université de Montréal).
