At the 61st Biennale Arte, Kunbi’s layered paintings probe silence as a social and political condition in which material, memory, and power converge.
22 March 2026
Tegene Kunbi. Dale Grant Photography, © Dale Grant. Courtesy the artist.
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. 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.
Tegene Kunbi, Untitled 2025-2026, oil and textiles on canvas, 400 x 350 cm. Photo by Yero Adugna Eticha. Courtesy the artist.
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.
Tegene Kunbi, Untitled 2025-2026, oil and textiles on canvas, 390 x 300 cm. Photo by Yero Adugna Eticha. Courtesy the artist
Material becomes the primary site through which these asymmetries are staged. Kunbi brings together textiles of sharply contrasting provenance and meaning, hand-knit fabrics produced by his mother alongside industrial materials made for African markets, sacred garments used in religious contexts alongside utilitarian fabrics associated with domestic interiors. Drawing on Ethiopia’s diverse cultural landscape, including regional weaving traditions historically tied to expressions of identity and autonomy, these elements are assembled into dense pictorial fields. Their juxtaposition unsettles inherited hierarchies, compelling materials that would otherwise remain socially and culturally segregated to engage in proximity and dialogue.
In these works, painting is neither purely visual nor passive. Instead, it operates as an active site of negotiation, where meaning is produced through duration, repetition, and encounter. The surface becomes a space where contradictions are held rather than resolved, where silence takes on material form. Kunbi’s practice thus proposes a mode of looking that resists immediacy, asking viewers to engage with the slow accumulation of relations embedded within each work.
Tegene Kunbi Untitled 2025-2026, oil and textiles on canvas 390 x 300 cm . Photo by Yero Adugna Eticha. Courtesy the artist
The exhibition also turns its attention to the conditions of display. Within institutional contexts, artworks are frequently mediated through labels, captions, and curatorial narratives that assert interpretive authority. Language, in this sense, speaks on behalf of the visual, reinforcing a hierarchy in which meaning is stabilised through text. Kunbi’s approach challenges this structure, positioning painting as a site where such regimes are both enacted and unsettled. By foregrounding material presence over explanatory framing, the works open space for alternative forms of interpretation that exceed linguistic capture.
Commissioned by Ambassador Demitu Hambisa Bonsa and promoted by the Ethiopian Ministry of Tourism in collaboration with the Embassy of Ethiopia in Italy, Shapes of Silence signals an ongoing commitment to cultural exchange and international dialogue. Supported by Primo Marella Gallery, the exhibition contributes to a growing visibility of Ethiopian contemporary art within global circuits.
Open to the public from 9 May to 22 November 2026.
