Ebti Nabag
SAFE IN PUBLIC SPACE: A PHOTO ESSAY
Over the course of the complete Safe in Public Space initiative, Toronto-based portrait and documentary photographer Ebti Nabag will travel beyond The Bentway site to public spaces city-wide, capturing communities’ changing interactions with their local parks, squares, and centres of communal gathering. Nabag’s work will examine, in real time, how ideas of safety manifest and are communicated in public space through borders and boundaries, signs and symbols, public space architectures, and delineations of space.
Who determines the rules for public space safety, and how are those rules indicated and enforced? How do communities — as the experts of their own experiences, cultures, and comfort levels — work to subvert and reshape established rules of public space safety to better suit their needs in rapidly-changing times? Follow the evolution of Ebti Nabag’s work through the release of weekly images that expose, from neighbourhood to neighbourhood and across the city at large, what it means to seek safety in public space.