The Ethiopia Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale presents "Shapes of Silence," an exhibition by artist Tegene Kunbi, curated by Abebaw Ayalew, running from May 9 to November 22, 2026, at Palazzo Bollani. The show marks the culmination of Kunbi's thirty-year practice, exploring silence as a social and political condition through abstraction, textiles, and assemblage, drawing on Ethiopian folkloric traditions and material histories.
This exhibition matters because it reframes silence not as absence but as a charged, hierarchical space shaped by cultural expectation and political power. Kunbi's work challenges the interpretive authority of written language in exhibition contexts, using painting as a layered archive of labor, memory, and history. By bringing together textiles from contrasting social and religious contexts, the show compels a renegotiation of how meaning is made in both art and society.