Anthony Gebrehiwot

Anthony Gebrehiwot is an award winning Toronto based artist whose photographic practice examines how Black life, memory, identity, and possibility are shaped through images. Working across photography, collage, installation, and community based practices, Gebrehiwot is interested in the photograph as a record of lived experience and a space where time can be interrupted, reimagined, and made otherwise.

For more than a decade, Gebrehiwot has developed an intimate, vulnerable visual language rooted in Black and Pan African diasporic communities. His work considers the ways Black people construct and communicate identity through gesture, fashion, portraiture, performance, spirituality, and the spaces they inhabit. Rather than treating the image as a fixed representation, he approaches photography as a site of negotiation between subject and viewer, history and imagination, vulnerability and self definition.

His practice increasingly engages questions of Black temporalities and the relationship between past, present, and future. Ancestral knowledge, spirituality, technology, Afrofuturism, and the repetition of histories inform an ongoing investigation into how Black communities might imagine and build alternative futures. Across his work, Gebrehiwot considers what becomes possible when dominant systems of time, representation, and historical memory are disrupted, and when Black subjects are able to author their own visual and temporal realities.

Gebrehiwot's work is held in the collection of the Canada Council’s Art Bank, the Doris McCarthy Gallery, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen's University, and the Wedge Collection, among others. His work has also been exhibited in institutional and public contexts across Canada, including Echoes of Devotion, a large scale public artwork created for Queen's University that brings together African material culture, spirituality, memory, and futurity. His practice continues to ask not only what an image can reveal, but what it can make possible.

For all inquiries email: tony@xvxyphoto.com