Threads of Refuge Curatorial Talk by Thy Phu

Threads of Refuge co-curator Thy Phu will discuss the collaborative process behind the development and presentation of the exhibition, currently on view in the Instructional Centre Atrium. In front of the work, Phu will speak about how the framework of oral storytelling and commissioned portraits empowers the refugee participants to communicate their lived experience, on their own terms.

This program is free and open to the public. Drop-in, no registration required. If you require any accommodations, please let us know through the registration form or contact dmg.utsc@utoronto.ca.

This talk will be held in the Instructional Centre Atrium at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Seating will be available. The venue is wheelchair accessible.

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 publications, 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.