Wangechi Mutu has been pushing the conservators to their limit. 

The Kenyan-American artist, 52, developed a novel concept for her solo exhibition at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, which opens next week. Rather than battle the villa’s gilded columns, elaborately painted walls, and patterned marble floors for attention, she will hang the majority of her works from the ceiling. 

“The negative space is the largest room — it’s where the audience walks and where the air floats around,” Mutu tells me over coffee at her plant- and art-filled home and studio in Brooklyn, New York. “I could weave through the rooms and be a bit like a phantom, like a spirit.”

The only problem: every mural-covered ceiling in the 17th-century villa is a work of art in itself. After the conservators’ dread subsided, the staff set to work embedding wire in the cornices and chandelier mounts, enabling the unorthodox installation.

This commitment to pushing viewers, institutions, even herself, into unfamiliar territory, is a guiding force for Mutu. Over the course of her career, she has delved into nearly every significant medium in contemporary art: video, performance, collage, painting, sculpture and installation. In the process, she has become a darling of encyclopedic museums that are eager to attract new audiences and inject fresh meaning into their historic architecture and collections.

Francesca Cappelletti, the director of Galleria Borghese, says she chose Mutu to be the first living female artist to take over the villa and neighbouring gardens because of her “ability to engage with the monumental architecture of a public space”. Mutu’s exhibition of about 25 works, titled Black Soil Poems, is the second in a series of solo shows featuring female artists at the Borghese (the first, in 2024, was of the late American sculptor Louise Bourgeois).  

Mutu has been a favourite of plugged-in curators since she began exhibiting her ferocious, unnerving collages of woman-animal hybrids in New York in the early 2000s. “I was so blown away by its strangeness,” Adrienne Edwards, senior curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, says of an early encounter with a Mutu collage. “It was unlike anything I’d ever seen.”

A higher-profile career breakthrough came in 2019, when Mutu became the first artist commissioned to create new work in the long-vacant niches outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Inspired by caryatids — sculptures of women used to support both roofs in classical western architecture and intricately carved thrones of African royalty — she designed four bronze seated figures adorned with highly polished discs. Originally scheduled to be on view at the Met for three months, the women ended up holding vigil over Fifth Avenue for more than a year due to the pandemic. Two of them will reappear on the facade of the Galleria Borghese. 

Some Met officials worried that the sun glinting off the discs would glare into the multimillion-dollar apartments across the street, angering the neighbours. But Mutu remained steadfast. Part of the point, she says, was to reflect — literally and figuratively — the many cultures, including ancient Egypt, that worshipped the sun and considered it the ultimate source of knowledge. 

Mutu’s transnational perspective is the result of a peripatetic adolescence and adulthood. Born and raised in Nairobi to a businessman and writer father and a nurse mother, she attended boarding school in Wales. After studying cultural anthropology and art in New York and receiving her MFA from Yale, she settled in Brooklyn in 2000. Since 2016, she has split her time between New York and Nairobi. At both studios, clocks marking the time in each city hang above her computer. 

Mutu studied under some of the masters of institutional critique — artists who scrutinised the power relations of the art world — including Fred Wilson and Hans Haacke. But her approach, which is informed by having grown up under a dictatorship, is often more subtle and seductive. “You have to figure out ways to be rebellious without being noticed,” she says. 

For her first solo presentation in Italy, Mutu considered both the country’s turbulent history and the current tensions surrounding migration and rising nationalism playing out across Europe and the US. Placed on top of an ancient Roman mosaic depicting a panther hunt are paper letters sprinkled with coffee grounds and tea leaves that spell out a passage from Bob Marley’s song “War” (1976). (The original plan was to sprinkle the grounds directly onto the mosaic’s surface; the conservators won that battle.)  

The song “War” is inspired by Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie’s 1963 speech to the UN on racial equality, which also harkened back to an earlier warning he gave the League of Nations about the danger of rising fascism in Italy before the second world war. (Italy occupied Ethiopia from 1935 to 1941.) 

For Mutu, the wildly fluctuating market for coffee and tea — important crops in her native Kenya and in Ethiopia — is both a vestige of colonial control and symbolic of a global economy that has been interconnected for millennia. How else would a panther, an animal native to Africa and Asia, find its way onto an ancient Roman mosaic? 

“There’s Roman emperors who were African — there’s a lot of Africa in Rome, and there’s a lot of Rome in Africa,” Mutu says. Yet Mussolini looked to the Roman empire as a symbol of Italian purity, just as far-right groups in the US have done more recently. “There’s a fiction being told about what Europe is, what Africa is,” Mutu says. “They are dangerous fictions being used against people, and not just in one country.”

Yet this show is also as personal as it is political. Mutu’s mother died two and a half years ago and her father died in March. Grief appears in the form of two floating heads with swirling, dreadlock-like crowns and jewellery dripping down their faces like tears. “I’m hoping the vibration [of visitors] in the building will give them a flicker of shimmery movement that makes it feel a little bit like they are haunted,” Mutu says. 

Hanging from the entrance hall is another new work, “Ndege” — Swahili for bird — that comprises a flock of suspended, abstracted avian forms. Their bodies are made from branches Mutu collected around her home in Nairobi; their wings are assembled from the curtains in her parents’ now-vacant bedroom.  

The alchemy of Mutu’s work comes from her refusal to consider the political, personal, historical, natural and spiritual as anything other than deeply interconnected. Take, for example, the “Shavasana” sculptures, prone bronze figures she installed at the foot of Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker” in the courtyard of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in 2021. The limp bodies are covered in bronze palm mats so that only their red-polished fingers (cast from a young woman working at the fabrication studio) and stiletto-wearing feet (cast from Mutu’s own) are visible. 

The implication of the placement is that the same society that birthed Rodin’s famous symbol of Enlightenment thought also trafficked slaves and perpetuated colonisation and gender-based violence; it was not as enlightened as it led itself, and others, to believe. One of the two “Shavasana” figures will be on view at the American Academy in Rome during the Villa Borghese exhibition. 

“There’s always a little weak point, an Achilles tendon — and that’s what I’m looking for,” Mutu says of her work with museums. “How do you excavate the truth in a territory that has done so much to tidy up the evidence of very, very disturbing secrets? The fun part for me is to find them — that little [place] where the sound eases out of the wooden floors, and you go, ‘Uh oh, there’s something under there’.”

June 10-September 14, galleriaborghese.beniculturali.it

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