Wangechi Mutu – Black Soil Poems
From June 10 to September 14, 2025, Galleria Borghese presents, for the first time within the residence of Cardinal Scipione, a solo exhibition by Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu, titled Black Soil Poems, curated by Cloé Perrone. Like the recently concluded exhibition dedicated to the Baroque poet Giovan Battista Marino, this project also stems from the museum’s ongoing interest in poetry. Conceived as a site-specific intervention, it unfolds throughout the museum’s interior galleries, its façade, and the Secret Gardens. It challenges classical tradition through suspensions, fragmented forms, and newly imagined mythologies, establishing a multilayered dialogue between the artist’s contemporary language and the symbolic institutional authority.
The title evokes the dual nature of Mutu’s practice: poetic and mythological, yet deeply connected to contemporary social and material contexts. “Black soil” — rich and malleable under the rain, almost like clay — appears across multiple geographies, including the Secret Gardens of the Galleria Borghese, which resonate with the artist’s imagination. From this soil, the sculptures seem to emerge, as if molded by a primordial force, giving shape to stories, myths, memories, and poems. The metaphor underscores the generative and transformative power of her work: rooted in materiality, yet open to multiple future interpretations.
Wangechi Mutu’s intervention introduces a new vocabulary into the historical and symbolic architecture of the Galleria Borghese. Through sculpture, installation, and moving image, the artist proposes an innovative approach to the museum space — one that challenges hierarchy, permanence, and fixed meaning. Her works question the visual weight and authority of the collection through strategies of suspension, fluidity, and fragmentation. In doing so, the museum is no longer presented as a static container of objects, but as a living organism, in continuous transformation, shaped by loss, adaptation, and reconfiguration.
The exhibition is structured in two complementary sections. Inside the museum, Mutu radically reconsiders spatial orientation: her sculptures never obscure the Borghese collection; rather, appear as subtle additions — ethereal presences that hover in the air, float lightly, or rest on horizontal surfaces. Works such as Ndege, Suspended Playtime, First Weeping Head and Second Weeping Head defy gravitational logic, delicately hanging from the ceilings and framing new lines of sight. This act of suspension is not merely formal: it introduces a shift of historical narratives and material hierarchies. The museum’s visual field is redrawn, opening new modes of perception to our gaze.
The materials — bronze, wood, feathers, soil, paper, water and wax — are central to the exhibition’s ethos. Bronze in particular is stripped of its traditional connotations to become a vessel of ancestral memory, of recovery, and of multiplicity. By inserting organic, fluid, and mutable substances into a context traditionally dominated by marble, stucco, and gilded surfaces, the artist reaffirms a poetics of transformation and becoming — thus anticipating a theme that will be central to the museum’s 2026 exhibition program: metamorphosis.
Black Soil Poems invites us to transcend fixed perspectives, shifting our gaze to allow the coexistence of multiple narratives and revealing the museum not only as a space of memory, but as a site of imagination and transformation. Wangechi Mutu’s interventions urge viewers to inhabit the museum differently — to look not only at what is on display, but also at what has been removed, silenced, or rendered invisible.
Outdoors, on the museum’s façade and in the Secret Gardens, a series of bronze sculptures populate the landscape: The Seated I and The Seated IV — two contemporary caryatids originally created for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2019 as part of The Facade Commission — mark a significant moment of engagement between the artist and a major public institution. Also present are Nyoka, Heads in a Basket, Musa and Water Woman bronzes that reinterpret archetypal vessels as sites of transformation. With The End of eating Everything, Mutu expands her sculptural language into video, adding a temporal and immersive dimension to her ongoing exploration of myth. These works introduce new hybrid forms, part human, part mythological, part symbolic vessel, drawing on the traditions of East Africa and global cosmologies, as if emerging from a symbolic ground. In their quiet occupation of the gardens and architectural thresholds, they offer a counterbalance to the site’s classical order, challenging idealized form and linear narrative in favor of ambiguity, otherness, and spiritual presence. Sound, whether audible or implied, and its trace play a subtle but pervasive role in the exhibition: from the suspended rhythm of Poems by my great Grandmother I, to the lyrics resting in Grains of Words, drawn from Bob Marley’s song WAR, references Haile Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia (1930–1974) and a key figure in anti-colonial movements, whose 1963 speech at the United Nations called for an end to racial injustice. Language becomes sculptural, and sound becomes a form of memory.
The exhibition continues at the American Academy in Rome, where Shavasana I is on view. This bronze figure, lying down and covered by a woven straw mat, takes its name from the yoga pose “shavasana” (corpse pose) and is inspired by a real-life incident. Its placement in the Academy’s atrium, surrounded by ancient Roman funerary inscriptions, amplifies themes of death, surrender, and the dignity of life.
With this exhibition, Galleria Borghese continues its commitment to contemporary art, following recent exhibitions such as Giuseppe Penone Universal Gestures (2023) and Louise Bourgeois Unconscious Memories (2024), fostering renewed way of seeing space, enriched with new connections and perspectives through the vision of a major international artist.
The exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of FENDI, official sponsor of the show.