Njola Impressions: Kiteezi — Theseustempel
Featured in the 2026-W22 newsletter
- The file
- The practical details Claire checked before this went into the index.
- When
- 28 May 2026 – 11 October 2026
- Where
- Theseustempel im Volksgarten, 1010 Wien — the 1st
- Price
- Free (opening); museum entry for subsequent visits
- Indoor/Outdoor
- Contemporary Art
- Installation
- Sustainability
- 1st district
Ugandan artist Nabukenya Allen, who works under the name Njola, has spent the last months in Vienna as an artist in residence through PART International Art Residency Austria. Her project here begins with a specific catastrophe: the Kiteezi landfill collapse in Kampala in August 2024, which killed dozens and displaced thousands. Rather than respond with outrage alone, Allen has been transforming the waste — literal refuse from that site — into objects and installations that ask harder questions about consumption, renewal, and the labour that holds cities together.
The Work
The exhibition opens outdoors in the Volksgarten's Theseustempel, a neoclassical temple that sits at the edge of the park like a folly. The contrast is deliberate. Allen's work, made from landfill waste, sits inside a structure built to last, in a city known for its imperial permanence. The pieces address the Boda-Boda drivers of Kampala — the motorcycle taxi workers who navigate the city's informal economy — and the systems that generate the waste in the first place.
This is not gentle art. It does not ask you to feel bad. It asks you to think about the distance between where things end up and where they come from, and who pays the cost of that distance.
Why Now
We covered this briefly when the opening was announced in May, but it's worth returning to now that the exhibition is in full swing through October. The work deserves the attention. Allen's residency in Vienna is itself a kind of bridge — an artist from Kampala, working in an Austrian institution, using materials from a specific disaster to speak about systems that are not specific to Uganda at all. Over-consumption is Viennese too. So is the invisible labour that keeps cities running.
The opening vernissage on May 28 was free and outdoors. Subsequent visits require standard Weltmuseum admission, but the work is worth the ticket.
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