Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu is the first living female artist to exhibit at Galleria Borghese. Her work, Black Soil Poems, reimagines the museum through suspended forms, radical spatial gestures, and new mythologies. Curated by Cloé Perrone, the exhibit will run until September 14, 2025.
Like the recently concluded exhibition dedicated to the Baroque poet Giovan Battista Marino, this project stems from the museum’s ongoing interest in poetry. Conceived as a site-specific intervention, it unfolds throughout the museum’s interior galleries, façade, and 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, Black Soil Poems, 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 resonates 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.
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.
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.
This story first ran in NYOTA’s Art is Life Issue. Read more from the issue here and purchase a print copy here
