FROM SEPTEMBER 15, ALL THAT CHANGES YOU. METAMORPHOSIS BY ISAAC JULIEN
Within the framework of the exhibition Metamorphoses. Ovid and the Arts, the film installation All That Changes You. Metamorphosis (2025) by British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, curated by Lorenzo Giusti, will be presented from 15 September to 25 October 2026.
Conceived specifically by the artist for the spaces of the Uccelliera at Galleria Borghese, the video installation draws inspiration from Giulio Romano’s fresco cycle at Palazzo Te in Mantua, extending the exhibition through the immersive language of the moving image.
In dialogue with the exhibition’s principal themes, Isaac Julien’s work reinterprets metamorphosis as a continuous process of transformation, interweaving myth, multiple temporalities, and the relationship between the human and the “more-than-human”. Through its rich visual and narrative dimension, the film offers a contemporary reflection on change as a generative force that permeates nature, history and human experience, presenting a fresh and timely perspective on one of the central themes of Ovid’s poem and of the exhibition as a whole.
The film features internationally acclaimed actresses Sheila Atim and Gwendoline Christie, who portray two enigmatic celestial and prophetic figures. Travelling across different eras, landscapes and architectural settings, they guide viewers through a meditation on transformation as a permanent condition of existence and on the possibility of imagining new relationships between human beings, the environment and other species.
Originally conceived as a ten-screen installation, All That Changes You. Metamorphosis begins with the remarkable architecture of Palazzo Te before unfolding across a constellation of sites spanning different periods and imaginaries: from Charles Jencks’s Cosmic House in London to the ancient forests of Redwood National and State Parks in California, as well as a number of significant examples of contemporary architecture. Each location becomes a narrative device, bringing history, landscape and vision into dialogue while revealing metamorphosis as a principle that unites the natural, cultural and technological worlds.
The film also draws upon a wide-ranging constellation of literary and philosophical references. Donna Haraway’s reflections on multispecies relationships, the visionary fiction of Naomi Mitchison and the speculative science fiction of Octavia E. Butler inform a narrative that moves beyond an exclusively anthropocentric perspective, opening up new ways of imagining coexistence and rethinking the relationship between living beings and the planet.
For its presentation at Galleria Borghese, Isaac Julien has developed a new configuration of the work, specifically adapted to the spaces of the Uccelliera. Built in the seventeenth century as a pavilion to house the Villa’s exotic birds, the Uccelliera is a place where architecture, garden and landscape exist in an inseparable dialogue. Within this setting, the artist presents a single-channel version of the work in which the moving image is multiplied through a system of mirrors that continuously fragments and reflects it. This intervention transforms the exhibition space into a dynamic perceptual environment, where the principle of metamorphosis is experienced not only through the film itself but also through the act of looking, as viewers encounter images in a constant state of duplication, refraction and transformation.
The new installation thus establishes an original dialogue with the context of Galleria Borghese while conceptually extending the exhibition Metamorphoses. Ovid and the Arts. If Ovid’s poem identifies transformation as a universal law governing humans, gods, animals and the natural world alike, Isaac Julien’s work offers a contemporary reinterpretation, demonstrating how change continues to be one of the fundamental lenses through which we understand the present and imagine the future.