Akalimu
Exhibition Title: Akalimu: Navigating Urban Work in a Warming Uganda
Exhibition Type: Site-Specific Public Pop-Up Exhibition & Visual Research Lab
Research Partners: The University of Leeds & The GENERATE Project (Gender, Generation, and Climate Change)
Venue: Nakasero Market, Kampala, Uganda (Staged directly within the workspace of the research subjects)
Exhibition Date: July 19th, 2022
Field Research Scope: Multi-city study across Kampala, Jinja, Fort Portal, Masaka, and Gulu
Long-Term Archive Context: Part of the #InvisibleCities1000Days initiative (Feb 20, 2020 – Nov 2, 2022)
Medium: Fine Art Photography, Photo-Elicitation, and Soundscape Installation
Exhibition Narrative
The research-driven project "Akalimu: Navigating Urban Work in a Warming Uganda" draws its conceptual inspiration from the 2013 hit song Akalimu by the legendary Ugandan duo Goodlyfe Crew, which translates loosely to "work and its challenges." This local soundtrack resonated deeply with photographer Jim Joel Nyakaana as he experienced the structural hardships of working directly under a scorching sun during his massive, self-initiated 1,000-day urban archival project, #InvisibleCities1000Days.
The catalyst for this specific body of work was a 1st Place Award-Winning Photograph (below) captured by Jim Joel in September 2021 for the ‘Climate and Gender (In)Justice in the City’ competition. While stuck in a dense Kampala traffic jam on a motorcycle taxi, Jim Joel photographed a woman who had unzipped the back of her dress simply to cope with the suffocating heat stress of the day. This fleeting moment exposed a profound, gendered inequality in urban climate adaptation: while men can easily unzip or remove their shirts in public to cope with rising temperatures, women face immense societal judgments and physical limitations.
Using this image and the Akalimu soundtrack as architectural blueprints, Jim Joel launched an investigative study combining documentary photography, photo-elicitation, and ambient soundscapes. The project systematically tracked young male adults (aged 20 to 30) enduring blistering heatwaves while operating informal outdoor businesses across five Ugandan cities (Gulu, Kampala, Masaka, Jinja and Fort Portal).
Featured artworks
Bypassing conventional institutional frameworks, the resulting works were brought directly back to the streets in a distinctive pop-up exhibition inside Nakasero Market. To break down colonial and bureaucratic barriers to art consumption, the canvas prints deliberately omitted traditional academic captions, displaying only the name of the respective city where the image was born. By returning the archive to the subjects’ own public spaces, the installation transformed Nakasero Market into a living public laboratory proving that subverting white-wall galleries can amplify grassroots climate messaging, foster deep community ownership, and bridge the gap between climate science and everyday human survival.
Installation Views at Nakasero Market.
