TEGENE KUNBI
SHAPES OF SILENCE
CURATED BY ABEBAW AYALEW
61st International Art Exhibition- La Biennale di Venezia
9 MAY – 22 NOVEMBER, 2026
The Ethiopian 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.
THE PAVILION.
SHAPES OF SILENCE
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.
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.
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”).
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.
The exhibition is also made possible with the support of Primo Marella Gallery, art gallery based in Milan and Lugano that represents the artist.
The Ethiopian Pavilion will be inaugurated during the preview days of the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (May 6, 7 and 8, 2026). It will be open to the public from Saturday, May 9 to Sunday, November 22, 2026.
– Abebaw Ayalew and Yohannes Mulat Mekonnen
TEGENE KUNBI
Artist
Ethiopian artist Tegene Kunbi, born in 1980 in Addis Ababa, completed his studies in 2004 with a degree in Painting and Art Education from the Fine Arts School at Addis Ababa University. Following his graduation, he served as a lecturer at Kotebe College of Education.
In 2008, he was awarded the prestigious DAAD scholarship, which enabled him to leave Ethiopia and continue his studies in Germany at the Universität der Künste Berlin. There he pursued a Master of Fine Arts, which he obtained in 2011.
Since then, Kunbi has been living and working between Addis Ababa and Berlin. The Artist gained international recognition after receiving the Grand Prix Léopold Sédar Senghor, the main prize of the Dak’Art Biennale 2022 – one of the most significant platforms for contemporary African art.
The Artist has participated in numerous international solo and group exhibitions, presenting his signature abstract works in a variety of contexts, including collaborative international projects and workshops. His work has been exhibited in cities such as Milan, Paris, New York, Berlin, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Nagoya, Accra, Dakar and many others.
Tegene Kunbi receiving the Grand Prix Léopold Sédar Senghor, Dak’Art Biennale, Senegal, 2022.ABEBAW AYALEW
Curator
Abebaw is born in 1976 province of Gojjam, Ethiopia. He graduated from Addis Ababa University, Department of History with a BA degree in History in 1998. In the same year he was employed Graduate Assistant in the Department of History the same university. In 2002 Abebaw has his MA degree in History from Addis Ababa University. He did his MA thesis on Ethiopian art history, “A History of 18th and 19th Century Ethiopian Painting; A Study of the Second Gondarine Style of Painting in Selected Chrches of East Gojjam”. Following his graduation, he became full faculty member of the Department of History, Addis Ababa University.
Abebaw has made an extensive field work and research on Ethiopian art in northern and central Ethiopia. He has taught Ethiopian history and Ethiopian art history at Addis Ababa University and the Ale School of Fine Arts and Design which is part of Addis Ababa University. He has participated in several heritage conservation projects most of which are Ethiopia’s famous monuments and church mural paintings. In recent years Abebaw was instrumental in the realization of the Unity Park and Museum project, the Adwa Victory Memorial Museum, The National Palace Museum Project. In 2019 Abebaw was appointed Deputy Director General of the Ethiopian Heritage Authority. Since 2022 he is Director General of the Authority.