Ethiopian Pavilion 2026: Shapes of Silence

At the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Ethiopia returns with Shapes of Silence, a solo presentation by Addis Ababa-based artist Tegene Kunbi, curated by Abebaw Ayalew. About Installed at Palazzo Bollani, the exhibition marks the country’s second participation in Venice, building on its 2024 debut while extending its presence within one of the most visible platforms for contemporary art. Bringing together the culmination of three decades of studio practice, Kunbi’s latest body of work approaches silence not as absence, but as a charged and generative condition. Working across abstraction, textile, and assemblage, the artist constructs paintings that function as layered material archives. Surfaces accumulate histories of labour, belief, and cultural expectation, forming compositions that resist resolution and invite sustained attention. Silence emerges here as a space of tension, one shaped as much by what is withheld as by what is made visible. The exhibition draws on Ethiopian oral traditions, in which silence occupies an ambivalent position. Proverbs that frame silence as wisdom and restraint alongside those that warn of its dangers, producing a field of ethical negotiation. Kunbi translates this paradox into material terms, treating silence as something that is performed, enforced, and inhabited. In doing so, he foregrounds the uneven distribution of voice and authority across social and political structures, where distinctions such as male and female, centre and periphery, sacred and ordinary continue to shape who is permitted to speak and who is rendered unheard. Read more Toggle Installation