Ca’ del Duca 3052, Corte del Duca Sforza
San Marco, 30124, Venezia, Italy
Sat 10am – 6pm
As collectors, curators, artists, critics, and cultural practitioners descended upon Venice for the preview week of the 2026 Venice Biennale, Ethiopian contemporary artist Dawit Abebe unveiled BLACKBOX, a compelling and conceptually layered solo exhibition presented by AKKA Project. Running from May 7 to June 16, 2026, the exhibition occupies a significant position within the broader cultural landscape of Venice this season, offering a reflective and intellectually charged counterpoint to the spectacle, national narratives, and large-scale institutional presentations unfolding across the city during one of the art world’s most globally visible moments. Installed within AKKA Project Venezia, BLACKBOX presents a body of paintings and mixed-media works that examine the unstable and fragmented nature of memory, perception, identity, and historical consciousness. Through layered surfaces populated by recurring figures, embedded textual traces, symbolic forms, fragmented gestures, and emotionally charged colour palettes, Abebe constructs visual environments that resist singular interpretation. Instead of offering fixed narratives or easily decipherable images, the works operate as open systems — spaces where meaning continuously shifts and where viewers are invited to navigate ambiguity, absence, and accumulation. The exhibition becomes less about delivering answers and more about activating a sustained process of reflection and interpretation. The exhibition also marks an important moment within Abebe’s ongoing residency at AKKA Project Venice, where the artist has been developing new works and expanding his research in direct dialogue with the city itself. The residency programme, dedicated to artists from Africa and its diaspora, has increasingly positioned Venice not merely as a backdrop for artistic production but as an active conceptual terrain shaped by centuries of movement, exchange, migration, commerce, spirituality, and cultural transmission. Within this context, BLACKBOX emerges as both an exhibition and an evolving investigation into the ways histories are carried, concealed, fragmented, and reimagined across bodies, places, and time.
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At the conceptual centre of BLACKBOX lies the idea of the “black box” itself — a term traditionally associated with systems whose internal mechanisms remain hidden or unknowable. For Abebe, however, the black box becomes far more than a technical metaphor. It transforms into an epistemological and poetic framework through which memory, identity, and subjectivity can be understood. In the exhibition, memory is not presented as stable documentation or linear historical record. Rather, it appears as an unstable constellation of traces: layered, partial, obscured, and continuously rewritten through perception and experience. The paintings mirror this condition through stratified compositions in which images overlap, dissolve, and re-emerge, producing surfaces that feel simultaneously archaeological and contemporary.
This layered quality is especially evident in the way Abebe approaches the human figure throughout the exhibition. His figures rarely settle into fixed identities or fully legible narratives. Instead, they emerge as unstable presences shaped by processes of recollection, imagination, disappearance, and reconstruction. Faces are obscured, forms fragment into abstraction, and bodies become repositories of historical and emotional residue rather than sites of certainty. Textual fragments, residual marks, inscriptions, and collage-like accumulations further complicate the pictorial space, suggesting that every present moment is constructed upon histories that remain only partially accessible. In Abebe’s hands, painting becomes a method of excavating these unstable layers while simultaneously acknowledging the impossibility of fully recovering or resolving them.
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