Ethiopia 2026

Title: Shapes of Silence
Commissioner: Ambassador Demitu Hambisa Bonsa
Curator: Abebaw Ayalew
Exhibitor: Tegene Kunbi

Representing thirty years of studio practice, the exhibition explores silence as a social and political condition through a new series of works involving abstraction, textiles, and assemblage. The artist treats painting as a layered material archive, approaching silence as a charged space shaped by cultural expectations and material history.

In Ethiopia, silence is often framed by paradoxical folkloric traditions that view it as both a virtue and a potential risk. The exhibition examines silence as a space of restraint and ethical negotiation where the right to speak is unevenly distributed across social and political binaries. By incorporating weaving traditions from various regions, the work brings together materials that carry specific histories of labour and belief, forcing them into proximity on the painted surface.

The project also addresses how silence functions within exhibition practices, where written language often claims interpretive authority over the visual. Kunbi’s works refuse to be passive; instead, they function as an archive where silence takes material form.