In Ethiopia, there are two ways to fail at silence. Speak, and you may be marked as reckless. Stay silent, and you may be accused of hiding an illness that needed naming. Tegene Kunbi grew up inside that contradiction, and at sixty-one editions of the Venice Biennale, he has turned it into paint and cloth.
Tegene Kunbi, Dale Grant Photography, © Dale Grant, Courtesy the artist
Shapes of Silence opens at Palazzo Bollani this May, marking Ethiopia's second appearance at the Biennale and the culmination of Kunbi's thirty years at the easel. Born in Addis Ababa in 1980, Kunbi trained in painting before a DAAD scholarship took him to Berlin, where he completed his MFA in 2011. He has shown across four continents since, and picked up the Dak'Art Biennale's top prize in 2022. But it's his relationship with textile, built up over decades, that gives this body of work its weight.
Tegene Kunbi, Infinite Dialogue, 2026, Oil and textile on canvas, 350 × 200 × 5 cm. Installation View.
His canvases are constructed rather than painted in the conventional sense. Oil and pigment sit alongside fabric, layered until the surface functions more like an archive than an image. Look closely and you'll find hand-knitted textiles made by his mother pressed against industrial cloth produced for African markets. Sacred garments, the kind used in religious contexts, sit beside material meant for something as unglamorous as a mattress. Regional Ethiopian weaving traditions, historically tied to identity and political autonomy, enter the mix too, drawn from a country the scholar Carlo Conti Rossini once described as a "museum of peoples."
Tegene Kunbi, The Heart of Silence,2026, (Detail) Oil and textile on canvas, 200 × 190 × 4,5 cm.
None of these fabrics arrive neutral. Each carries its own history of labour and belief, and Kunbi lets that history stay visible rather than smoothing it into the paint. The categories fracture on contact, forcing materials that rarely meet in daily life into the same visual field. The process is slow by design. Kunbi has described his practice as one of sustained, patient labour, building surfaces the way a weaver builds cloth, thread by thread, until the layering itself becomes a record of time spent.
Tegene Kunbi, Trittico, Untitled, 2026, Oil and textile on canvas, 300 × 387,5 × 4 cm. Installation view.
Kunbi has spoken of silence as something he carries in two forms. Within painting, abstraction resists translation into language, giving shape to what cannot easily be said. Beyond the studio, living between Addis Ababa and Berlin has taught him a different kind of silence, one lived through the body, where visibility itself becomes a condition to navigate, sometimes as exposure, sometimes as erasure.
Tegene Kunbi, Untitled, 2026 (Detail), Oil and textile on canvas, 100 × 80 × 3,2 cm
That friction extends to how the work wants to be read. Kunbi has spoken about how exhibition spaces tend to hand interpretive authority to wall text and curatorial captions, leaving the material and visual to do the listening. His paintings push back against that hierarchy, asking viewers to find meaning through proximity and accumulated labour, not explanation. As he writes in his artist statement, the work invites the world in "one material, one textile layer at a time."
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Further information:
Shapes of Silence, curated by Abebaw Ayalew, runs at the Ethiopia National Pavillion, Palazzo Bollani, Castello 3647, Venice, until 22 November 2026.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Tegene Kunbi, Horizon of Memory (Detail), 2026, Oil and textile on canvas, 120 × 100 × 4,5 cm.
All further images as credited in captions and courtesy of the artist.