VENICE.- Ethiopia Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia presents Shapes of Silence, an exhibition by Tegene Kunbi (b. 1980, Addis Ababa), curated by Abebaw Ayalew, open to the public from May 9 to November 22, 2026, in the prestigious setting of Palazzo Bollani.

Representing the culmination of Tegene Kunbi’s thirty years of studio practice, Shapes of Silence explores silence as a social and political condition through a new series of works that mobilizes abstraction, textiles, and assemblage. Working with painting as a layered material archive, the artist approaches silence not as absence, but as a charged space shaped by cultural expectation and material history.

Silence as a social practice in Ethiopia often draws its justification from the country’s rich folkloric traditions. Within these traditions, silence holds an ambivalent and paradoxical status, praised as a virtue while simultaneously regarded as a potential misdeed.

The proverb ዝምታ ወርቅ ነው (“Silence is gold”) frames advised silence as a sign of wisdom and restraint, yet this valuation is tempered by caution. Other expressions warn that በሽታውን ያልተናገረ መድሀኒት የለውም (“He who does not name his illness finds no cure”) or that ካለመናገር ደጅ አዝማችነት ይቀራል (“By not speaking, one risks exclusion from opportunity”).

Silence thus emerges not as a mere absence, but as a space of restraint, tension, and ethical negotiation. This space is also deeply political, as the right to speak and to interpret is unevenly distributed along entrenched social and political binaries—male over female, center over periphery, sacred over ordinary. Those positioned on the latter side are denied discursive authority, making silence a contested political condition.

In Tegene Kunbi’s work, the political enters through material choice: his practice invites these asymmetries into the pictorial field. His paintings bring together textiles of starkly contrasting provenance and significance, hand-knitted fabrics made by his mother alongside industrial textiles produced for African markets; sacred garments used in religious contexts alongside utilitarian materials designed for mattresses. Drawing on Ethiopia’s cultural diversity, once described by Carlo Conti Rossini as a “museum of peoples”, Kunbi also incorporates weaving traditions from different regions, where clothing and costume have historically marked cultural and political autonomy, forcing these distinct practices into a shared visual field. Each material carries specific histories of labor, belief, and political positioning. When assembled on the pictorial surface, these categories fracture, and painting becomes a site where socially and culturally segregated materials are compelled into proximity and renegotiation.

These questions of silence as a hierarchical and political condition extend to exhibition practice itself. In exhibition spaces, artworks are routinely framed by explanatory texts, labels, captions, and curatorial narratives that claim interpretive authority. Language speaks for the artwork, while the visual and multimodal are rendered silent, reinforcing a hierarchy in which written language becomes the primary site of meaning-making.

Against this backdrop, Kunbi approaches painting as a platform where such regimes of silence are both enacted and unsettled. His works refuse the conception of painting as a passive or purely visual medium; instead, painting functions as a layered archive of labor, memory, and history, operating in a minor key in which silence takes material form and meaning emerges through duration, proximity, and material presence rather than explanation.

Promoted by the Ethiopian Ministry of Tourism in collaboration with the Embassy of Ethiopia in Italy, Shapes of Silence marks the country’s second participation at La Biennale di Venezia, following its debut in 2024, underscoring Ethiopia’s commitment to promoting contemporary art and international cultural dialogue.