Ethiopia

Artworks are often silenced in exhibition spaces: visual works are routinely framed by explanatory texts, labels and captions that claim interpretive authority. Language speaks for the artwork, while the visual and multimodal are rendered silent. This hierarchy reproduces a broader asymmetry between language and everything else, in which written language becomes a privileged medium that establishes meaning.

Such hierarchies extend beyond the exhibition space. The right to speak, to interpret and to observe is unevenly distributed along entrenched social and political binaries: male over female, the elite over the common, colonizer over colonized. Those on the latter side are rendered visible yet denied discursive authority. Silence thus emerges as a contested political condition.

In this year’s Ethiopian pavilion, marking the country’s second participation, Tegene Kunbi in Shapes of Silence approaches painting as a platform where these regimes of silence are both enacted and unsettled. Kunbi’s works refuse the conception of painting as a passive or purely visual medium. Instead, these monumental canvases operate as layered archives of labour, memory and history – a minor key in which silence takes material form, holding history, affect and power in suspension.