Zelaki Newsletter | JUNE 2025, Edition I
Memory, Movement, and Making
This week, we look at artists and architects who are reshaping history, reclaiming space, and reimagining identity.
From Aïda Muluneh’s striking new solo show in Milan to Wangechi Mutu’s groundbreaking installation in Rome, African artists are bringing ancestral memory and personal vision into some of Europe’s most iconic institutions. At the Venice Biennale, a UK and Kenya curatorial team invites audiences to rethink architecture through the lens of repair and ecological care.
Each story reflects a different kind of journey. These are stories that move across borders, through time, and within the self. Together, they offer a layered portrait of creativity that is grounded in both legacy and transformation.
News from Africa And Beyond
Aïda Muluneh Brings The Homeless Wanderer to Milan
Ethiopian visual artist and photographer Aïda Muluneh is presenting her newest solo exhibition, The Homeless Wanderer, at Playlist Gallery in Milan. The exhibition opened on June 12 and will run through July 30. It combines photography, painting, and symbolic design to reflect on themes such as displacement, identity, memory, and the concept of home.
The title of the show is taken from a piano composition by Ethiopian musician Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. The music sets a reflective tone that is echoed in Muluneh’s imagery. Her use of vibrant color, geometric compositions, and stylized female figures evokes both personal and collective histories. These women appear as ancestral guardians who carry stories of migration and cultural continuity.
Muluneh draws inspiration from her own experience living across the African continent. She spent many years in Ethiopia and Côte d’Ivoire, and her work is grounded in these diverse environments. Rather than conform to outsider portrayals of Africa, her art offers a new way of seeing one shaped by memory, land, and self-definition.
The Homeless Wanderer invites viewers to consider identity as something shaped by movement and rooted in history. It is both a personal meditation and a challenge to narrow global narratives about Africa.
THE SACRED MEMORY OF THE DIVINE Aïda Muluneh
British Pavilion at Venice Biennale Repaired by UK–Kenya Team
This year’s Venice Architecture Biennale features a bold and timely exhibition at the British Pavilion, curated by a transnational team from the United Kingdom and Kenya. The curators include Stella Mutegi and Kabage Karanja of Nairobi-based Cave Bureau, working in collaboration with British scholars Kathryn Yusoff and Owen Hopkins. Their project, titled Geology of Britannic Repair, takes a critical look at the environmental and architectural legacies of British colonialism.
Drawing inspiration from the Great Rift Valley, the exhibition uses geological metaphors to reflect on the damage caused by centuries of extractive colonial practices. It asks how architecture might participate in repair rather than erasure. The curators center voices from regions directly shaped by colonial interventions and call for an architectural future rooted in ecological responsibility and indigenous knowledge.
The exhibition’s vision of “reverse futurism” promotes a radical reimagining of architectural progress, one that looks to ancestral wisdom rather than traditional Western trajectories. By rethinking the materials, stories, and systems used to build, the pavilion stands as a critique of Eurocentric histories and an invitation to global collaboration.
This year’s British Pavilion represents more than a national showcase. It is a shared act of reflection, questioning how we rebuild from the past and who gets to decide what the future of architecture should look like.
Photo by Francesco Galli, Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
Wangechi Mutu Makes History at Galleria Borghese
Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu has opened her landmark exhibition Black Soil Poems at Galleria Borghese in Rome, marking the museum’s first-ever solo show by a living female artist. The exhibition, which runs from June 10 to September 14, 2025, brings together around 25 of Mutu’s multimedia works, thoughtfully integrated into the villa’s lavish baroque spaces.
Mutu’s art explores the intersections of colonial history, spirituality, ecology, and personal loss. Some pieces are suspended from the ceiling, floating above viewers and inviting reflection. Others are embedded into the architecture itself, such as coffee grounds laid across centuries-old mosaics or sculptural branches transported from Nairobi. These gestures create dialogue between Europe’s imperial past and the contemporary African imagination.
The exhibition is also deeply personal. Mutu includes a number of haunting portraits shaped by the recent passing of her parents. These figures, drifting high above the gallery floor, represent more than private grief. They evoke shared cultural memory and loss, calling attention to both individual mourning and the histories that linger within physical spaces.
By presenting Black Soil Poems in one of Rome’s most prestigious institutions, Mutu brings African perspectives and materials into conversation with European heritage. The result is a powerful meditation on connection, rupture, and artistic reclamation.
Photo by Miranda Barnes
