KITEEZI. Njola Impressions

Entering the Weltmuseum Wien exhibition "Kiteezi" in the Theseus Temple in Vienna’s Volksgarten, the encounter is immediate and unsettling. Figures in elaborately designed garments stand on brightly colored islands connected by cable ducts. In the background, a monumental structure towers over the scene. A large sack filled with plastic canisters hangs from it, with a motorcycle placed beneath.

What exactly are we looking at here?

With her installation "Kiteezi", the Ugandan artist Njola references the landfill of the same name in Kampala, which collapsed in 2022, claiming lives. Yet she goes beyond this single event, pointing to something more fundamental: how do we engage with those areas of our global consumer reality where goods become waste and social centers turn into peripheries?

Waste is often understood as an endpoint — something discarded, removed, made invisible. In Njola’s practice, however, this definition begins to shift. The materials she works with — tires, flip-flops, bicycle inner tubes — are not treated as remnants of a completed lifecycle. They are starting points. They are re-appropriated, reworked, and transformed into new forms. What we call waste becomes matter in transition.

This transformation is not only material, but conceptual. By working with what society has already excluded, Njola reveals the fragility of the categories on which we rely: value and non-value, useful and useless, visible and invisible. Waste, in this sense, is not a fixed state but a position within a system of distribution and exclusion.

Yet her practice does not stop at critique. It moves toward reconnection.

In "Kiteezi", the landfill is not only a symbol of ecological collapse but also a site of survival. Many people live from and with these discarded materials. What is considered waste elsewhere becomes resource, income, and livelihood. Njola’s work acknowledges this reality and brings it into the center of artistic reflection.

Her art therefore functions as more than representation — it becomes a form of social practice. Through fashion, she develops a language that is at once bodily and accessible, rooted in something universally shared: the act of being clothed, of being in relation to material. Fashion here is not decoration, but communication — a means of making global structures tangible. At the same time, her artistic practice is deeply community-based: it is embedded in local contexts and directly involves people, creating forms of collaboration that generate income and economic agency for those who work within and through these material cycles.

For this reason, the work also extends beyond the exhibition space. The materials are not merely displayed; they are activated. Tires are cut, stitched, and transformed. Garments are worn, performed, and placed within space. Njola’s practice insists that art is not separated from life — it does not only represent reality but enacts it.

At the center of the installation stands a motorcycle, a reference to the boda-boda drivers of Kampala. Often marginalized within society, they are nonetheless essential to mobility and everyday life. By placing them at the center of the work, those who stand at the margins are re-inscribed into the narrative. The practice thus becomes an act of inclusion — a reintegration of what society itself often pushes to its edges.

Understood in this way, "Kiteezi" is not only an artwork but a proposition: that material, social, and ecological systems cannot be thought of separately. That what we discard elsewhere returns in transformed form. And that artistic practice can intervene in these cycles not only through representation, but by actively shaping how they are perceived and lived.

Against this background, the Weltmuseum Wien — within whose program the exhibition takes place — is also positioned as an ethnological museum. Ethnology, it becomes clear, must be deeply rooted in the everyday lives of people in order to remain relevant: especially, or perhaps precisely, in those areas of life from which we tend to avert our gaze.

https://www.weltmuseumwien.at/

Interviewee: Njola, Allen Nabukenya, Claudia Banz
Artworks by: Njola

Copyright info: The audio and video recording has been made with personal permission of the artist.
Licensing: 0
Language(s): German, English
Subtitles: German, English
Producer: KA21 GmbH / CastYourArt
Production crew: Wolfgang Haas, Helmut Feier, Michael Rottmann
Production country: Austria, Vienna