Wangechi Mutu - Black Soil Poems

Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu, born in Nairobi in 1972, is the protagonist of the exhibition at the Galleria Borghese, which once again demonstrates the museum’s interest in contemporary art (following exhibitions dedicated to Giuseppe Penone and Louise Bourgeois) and poetry.

The project, sponsored by FENDI, is conceived as a site-specific intervention that unfolds in the museum’s interior galleries, its façade and the Secret Gardens, introducing a new vocabulary into the historical and symbolic architecture of Cardinal Scipione’s residence. The title evokes the dual nature of Mutu’s artistic practice, poetic and mythological, yet rooted in materiality, in that “black soil” from which the sculptures seem to emerge, as if molded by a primordial force.

The exhibition is structured into two complementary sections. Inside the museum, works such as Ndege, Suspended Playtime, First Weeping Head and Second Weeping Head are added to the works in the Borghese collection without concealing it. By using materials such as bronze, wood, feathers, earth, paper, water and wax in a context traditionally dominated by marble, stucco and gilded surfaces, the artist reaffirms the poetics of transformation and becoming. Hanging from the ceilings or resting on horizontal surfaces, the works redesign the perception of the museum, no longer a simple container of objects but a living organism in continuous transformation.

Outside, on the museum façade and in the Secret Gardens, works such as The Seated I and The Seated IV (created in 2019 for the Metropolitan Museum in New York), Nyoka, Heads in a Basket, Musa and Water Woman 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 (inspired by Haile Selassie’s 1963 anti-colonial speech).

The exhibition continues at the American Academy in Rome, where Shavasana I is on view.