Art Review: Wangechi Mutu's Roman Debut Of Black Soil Poems At Galleria Borghese

Forbes

30-06-2025

Galleria Borghese. Wangechi Mutu. Poemi della terra nera - Installation view with Older Sisters © Galleria Borghese © Galleria Borghese
Wangechi Mutu–the Kenyan-American artist internationally celebrated for her visceral, genre-defying works–exhibits in Italy for the first time with Black Soil Poems . Mutu's debut Roman exhibition is currently on view at the historic Galleria Borghese. Curated by Cloé Perrone, the exhibition unfolds like a myth unearthed in fragments—emerging from the villa's Baroque opulence, threading through its ornate interiors, ascending to its façade, and finally settling into the Secret Gardens like memory returning to land. With this site-specific intervention, Mutu reshapes not only the physical spaces of the museum but also the historical and symbolic narratives long rooted within them.
Galleria Borghese. Wangechi Mutu. Poemi della terra nera - Installation view with Throned ļ © Galleria Borghese © Galleria Borghese
The Historic Setting: Galleria Borghese's Legacy
The Galleria Borghese–located in the heart of Rome's Villa Borghese gardens–is one of the city's most prestigious art museums. Originally built in the early 17th century by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V and a passionate art collector, the villa was designed as both a suburban retreat and a grand setting to showcase his vast collection, which included classical antiquities, Renaissance masterpieces, and Baroque works, from sculptures by Gian Lorenzo Bernini to paintings by Caravaggio, Raphael, and Titian.
Much like the museum's recent homage to Baroque poet Giovan Battista Marino, Black Soil Poems continues Galleria Borghese's engagement with the poetic and the mythological. But where Marino played with the exuberance of language, Mutu mines the deeper, often darker strata of meaning. The exhibition's title points to her core themes: 'black soil' evokes fertility, richness, history, trauma, and regeneration. It is material as metaphor—a place where stories germinate, bodies are buried and reborn, and poetry takes shape through clay-like memory.
Galleria Borghese. Wangechi Mutu. Poemi della terra nera - Installation view with Water Woman ļ © Galleria Borghese © Galleria Borghese
A Landmark Debut: Wangechi Mutu in Rome
Inside the Galleria Borghese, Mutu's interventions are elegant yet subversive. She neither displaces nor overwhelms the Borghese's famed collection of classical art. Instead, her works float, dangle and shimmer playfully—acting as whispers rather than proclamations. Sculptures such as Ndege , Suspended Playtime , and First Weeping Head are suspended delicately from the villa's ceilings, lightly interrupting the visual flow of the museum without obscuring it. These hanging pieces resist the pull of gravity and tradition alike. Their placement introduces a spatial reorientation: rather than gazing at static monuments of Western art history, visitors are urged to look up, around, within — to question what they see and what they don't.
This act of suspension, both literal and conceptual, is one of the exhibition's most resonant talking points. Mutu's powerful art destabilizes permanence and power. Bronze, often used to convey heroism and stability, is in Mutu's hands reimagined as porous and ancestral—a medium that can hold memory rather than impose legacy. By incorporating organic materials like wood, feathers, soil, and wax, Mutu draws attention to fragility, fluidity, and metamorphosis.
Galleria Borghese. Wangechi Mutu. Poemi della terra nera - Installation view with Underground Hornship | © Galleria Borghese © Galleria Borghese
Poetry in the Soil: Thematic Roots of the Exhibition
Mutu's enigmatic works do not mimic or mock classical aesthetics but create a contemporary counterpoint. They occupy liminal spaces—providing a bridge between tradition and reinvention, presence and absence. The museum becomes a palimpsest, with Mutu's sculptures as annotations in a language of ghosts and futures. She encourages viewers not just to look at what is visible, but to listen for what has been erased, silenced, or rendered invisible by centuries of patriarchal, colonial narratives.
The exhibition's thematic richness carries seamlessly into the villa's façade and throughout the gardens. Mutu plants her bronze figures in the gardens like sentinels from another world. The Seated I and The Seated IV –first presented by Mutu in New York City in 2019 for The Met's Façade Commission–reappear at Galleria Borghese with renewed force. Part woman, part monument, part oracle, Mutu's statues reclaim the historically male-coded trope of the caryatid. They bear the weight not of buildings, but of histories and the potential for radical futures.
Gardens as Portals: The Outdoor Installations
Elsewhere in the gardens, seminal pieces including Nyoka , Heads in a Basket , Musa , and Water Woman continue Mutu's excavation of archetypal vessels—forms that hold water, spirit, memory. They are elemental and enigmatic, invoking East African traditions and wider global cosmologies. Video work such as The End of Eating Everything extends Mutu's sculptural vocabulary into time-based media, where animated, mythological beings twist and morph in an allegorical feast of consumption and transformation. The villa's garden becomes a liminal threshold–a kind of portal between Eden and exile.
Galleria Borghese. Wangechi Mutu. Poemi della terra nera - Installation view with The Seated I and IV И. Galleria Borghese Galleria Borghese
The Sound of Memory: A Multisensory Encounter
Sound serves as an invisible thread throughout the show. From the ambient rhythm of Poems by my great Grandmother, to textual allusions drawn from Bob Marley's War —itself a reinterpretation of Haile Selassie's historic speech against racial injustice—Mutu weaves a multi-sensory tapestry of resistance and remembrance. Language becomes sculptural. Sound becomes a form of historical reckoning. The invisible becomes palpable.
Francesca Cappelletti, Director of the Galleria Borghese, aptly describes Mutu's work as encouraging a deeper, more intense way of looking — one that expands the museum experience beyond aesthetics into inquiry. 'They invite us to search for spirits, ghosts, transformation, and poetry,' she writes, 'to not stop at the visible or even at our horizon and its usual beauty.' Indeed, the exhibition reorients the museum from a shrine of preserved beauty into a site of poetic possibility and cultural dialogue.
Black Soil Poems also continues beyond the Borghese walls. At the American Academy in Rome, Mutu's sculpture Shavasana I lies in repose among ancient Roman funerary inscriptions. This bronze figure, covered by a woven mat, named after the yoga pose associated with rest and release, quietly embodies death, dignity, and surrender. The installation deepens the exhibition's themes of mortality, transformation, and presence within absence.
A Living Archive: Representation and the Black Female Body
Mutu's broader practice spans sculpture, painting, film, collage, and installation, consistently returning to the politics of representation. Her hybrid female figures and dystopian dreamscapes ask: Who is seen? Who is imagined? Who is erased? Through this visual lexicon, she interrogates systems that idealize, exoticize, or dehumanize the female body, particularly the Black female body. In her ongoing dialogue with figuration, Mutu doesn't just reclaim space, she redefines it.
The Language of Transformation: A Closing Reflection
Black Soil Poems is not only a personal milestone for Mutu–her first solo exhibition in Italy—but also a significant moment for the Galleria Borghese. It follows the museum's recent commitment to contemporary art, including notable exhibitions by Giuseppe Penone and Louise Bourgeois. This curatorial trajectory acknowledges that history is not a fixed inheritance but an evolving dialogue, and that the past gains meaning when refracted through the lens of the present.
Thanks to the support of FENDI, and a robust public program titled Esistere come donna (To Exist as a Woman), organized by Electa and Fondazione Fondamenta, the exhibition is part of a broader cultural conversation that considers gender, identity, and artistic lineage. With prestigious institutional partners, the program opens pathways for lectures and dialogues that expand upon the exhibition's themes.
In Black Soil Poems , Wangechi Mutu offers a deeply layered, sensorially rich encounter that reclaims myth, memory, and space. Her work whispers, glimmers, and unsettles—not to obscure the past, but to seed something new from its soil. In the ancient city of Rome, whose marble monuments often speak with the authority of history, Mutu introduces the language of transformation, calling us to listen, to look again, and to imagine otherwise.
Wangechi Mutu Black Soil Poems is at Galleria Borghese, Rome until September 14, 2025.