During the opening weeks of the 61st Venice Biennale, Ethiopian artist Dawit Abebe is presenting a different scale of encounter. His solo exhibition, BLACKBOX, at AKKA Project Venezia, runs from 7 May to 16 June 2026 and turns away from spectacle toward the more difficult territory of memory, emotion, and the experiences people carry without always being able to name them.

The title itself offers a useful way into the exhibition. A black box is something that contains information without immediately revealing its contents. It records, preserves, and holds what has happened. In Abebe’s work, that idea becomes a metaphor for the human interior: the memories, emotions, histories, and private experiences that remain present within a person even when they cannot be fully seen from the outside.

Through layered paintings and mixed-media works, Abebe constructs images that exist between recognition and uncertainty. Fragmented figures move across bold fields of colour. Symbols appear alongside handwritten text. Forms emerge and then dissolve back into the surface. The paintings often resist the clarity expected of a conventional narrative, allowing different elements to remain unresolved rather than forcing them into a single explanation.

That instability is central to how memory operates. The past rarely returns as a complete image. It arrives in fragments: a gesture, a colour, a place, a word, or an emotional sensation that cannot always be connected to a precise event. Abebe’s layered visual language reflects this condition, constructing paintings that feel less like fixed records than spaces in which different memories and experiences continue to move.

Born in Addis Ababa in 1978, Abebe studied at the Alle School of Fine Art and Design, developing a practice across painting, sculpture, photography, and design. His work has since been presented internationally across Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, including platforms such as 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair and Art Dubai.

In BLACKBOX, however, the movement is not only geographical. The exhibition considers what movement leaves behind in the individual.

Dawit Abebe, BLACK BOX, 2026 Courtesy of the Artist

One recurring figure in the works is the barefoot body. It appears as an image of vulnerability but also of endurance. Bare feet suggest direct contact with the ground, while simultaneously evoking travel, exposure, and the physical reality of moving from one place to another. The figure can therefore be read through multiple histories: migration, pilgrimage, displacement, survival, and the ongoing search for belonging.

These associations take on another dimension in Venice. The city has long been shaped by movement — through trade, migration, travel, and cultural exchange. For centuries, people and objects have arrived and departed through its waterways, carrying languages, beliefs, goods, and memories across geographical boundaries.

Placed within this context, Abebe’s figures do not offer a straightforward narrative about migration. Instead, they ask what movement does to the person who experiences it. What remains when someone leaves one place and enters another? Which memories travel with them? What parts of the self become visible in unfamiliar surroundings, and what remains hidden?

The fragmented nature of the paintings allows these questions to remain open. Abebe does not attempt to transform migration into a single symbolic experience. His figures carry uncertainty alongside resilience, and vulnerability alongside the capacity to continue moving.

This is where BLACKBOX finds its most compelling tension. The exhibition is concerned with what can be seen, but equally with what remains concealed. A painting can reveal a face while withholding its story. A written word can appear without providing a complete sentence. A body can occupy the canvas while its emotional history remains inaccessible.

Rather than treating these gaps as problems to be solved, Abebe makes them part of the work’s structure.

During a Biennale season dominated by major exhibitions and institutional statements, BLACKBOX offers a more intimate proposition. It asks viewers to consider the experiences people carry beneath the visible surface and to recognise that identity is often constructed from histories that cannot be immediately explained.

In Dawit Abebe’s work, the human being becomes a kind of black box: a container of memory, movement, loss, emotion, and experience. The paintings do not attempt to open that box completely. They remind us instead that some of what shapes a person may remain hidden — while continuing to determine the way they move through the world.