Theo Eshetu’s Venice Biennale Work Puts a Living Olive Tree at the Center of the Image
At the Venice Biennale, Theo Eshetu is presenting a work that strips his long-running interest in moving images down to something elemental: a single olive tree. In The Garden of the Broken-Hearted (2026), the Ethiopian-Dutch artist, born in 1958, places the tree on a rotating dais and projects a video of it back onto its own surface, creating a loop in which subject and image become nearly inseparable.
Eshetu has worked in film and video for more than four decades, often testing how an image changes when it is shown in more than one form. Earlier works such as Brave New World, The Slave Ship (The Law of the Sea), Atlas Fractured, Till Death Us Do Part, and The Return of the Axum Obelisk all explored that question through mirrors, multiple screens, banners, and projections. The Venice project continues that inquiry, but with a striking shift in scale and material presence.
The artist said the work developed in conversation with curator Koyo Kouoh before her death. He described those exchanges as deeply personal and said he was devastated by her loss. Their discussions turned to gardens, mourning, and the difficulty of making art in a moment marked by grief and uncertainty. For Eshetu, the garden became less a symbol of greenery than a way to think about human consciousness before culture fully defines it.
He reduced the project to one olive tree, about four and a half meters high, and said the practical challenge of moving it to Venice has become part of the work’s meaning. He is also making a separate film about the tree’s journey, though that piece will not be included in the exhibition.
Eshetu has framed the project as a meditation on absence and care, but also on narrative itself. The tree rotates, the image returns to the tree, and the viewer is left to consider what remains when the medium seems to disappear. In that sense, The Garden of the Broken-Hearted extends a practice that has long treated film not simply as representation, but as a way of asking how history, memory, and identity are assembled in the first place.
