by Alison Hugill // May 29, 2026
Vienna’s Klima Biennale opened this April under the theme ‘Unspeakable Worlds,’ with a host of exhibitions and events across the city. Examining the complexity of the climate crisis, the Biennale positions itself as a platform for art, science and society to try out new perspectives for a viable future: “When language reaches its limits, art opens new spaces.”
At its hub, the Kunsthaus Wien—an eccentric building designed by Austrian artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, a self-proclaimed “opponent of a straight line”—the group show ‘Seeds. Reclaiming Roots, Sowing Futures’ acts as the Biennale’s main attraction, featuring works by 14 international artists.
‘Seeds. Reclaiming Roots, Sowing Futures,’ 2026, installation view at KunstHausWien // Courtesy of KunstHausWien, photo by Iris Ranzinger
Lately, seeding and germination have proliferated as artistic metaphors in contemporary art exhibitions. At the recently-opened 2026 Venice Biennale, for example, the “Book Pavilion” outside the main exhibition in the Giardini hosts ‘Ideal Seeds for Fertile Grounds’—a library project by Dakar’s RAW Material Company. In it, the texts that inspired Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial thinking are available for visitors to read, deepening their connection to the theoretical and political inspirations behind the exhibition. As climate collapse and war dominate our news feeds, the idea of seeding new ground—both literally and figuratively—seems ever more pressing.
Jumana Manna: ‘Family (Extended),’ 2023, installation view ‘Seeds. Reclaiming Roots, Sowing Futures,’ 2026 at KunstHausWien // Courtesy of KunstHausWien, photo by Iris Ranzinger
While the works by the 14 artists at Kunsthaus Wien span a wide variety of media and different levels of didacticism, I am personally more drawn to the poetic contributions to the show—those that truly access the “unspeakable” qualities of the climate crisis, rather than displaying them on the level of environmental activism, data and metrics.
At the entrance to the show, I first catch sight of Jumana Manna’s joyful anthropomorphic sculptures, entitled ‘Family (Extended)’ (2023). The ceramic works, made in collaboration with Moroccan artisans, are artistic interpretations of the traditional “khabya”—containers built into old houses in the rural Levant and used to store grain. Mounted on the metal and concrete platform, the sculptures reference the changing architectures of grain storage, necessitated by the transition from communal to capitalist agricultural practices. Manna’s 2018 film ‘Wild Relatives’—which looks at a transaction of seed materials between Svalbard seed bank in Norway and ICARDA in Lebanon—will also be screened as part of the exhibition program.
‘Seeds. Reclaiming Roots, Sowing Futures,’ 2026, installation view at KunstHausWien // Courtesy of KunstHausWien, photo by Iris Ranzinger
Further into the show, I’m drawn to a brightly-lit patch of grass, growing inside an angular wooden enclosure that, architecturally and metaphorically, seems to battle Hundertwasser’s intentionally organic and uneven flooring. The work by Danish artist Tue Greenfort, entitled ‘Monoculture,’ displays the five most commonly grown crops in Austria, pointing to a rapid decline in local biodiversity. While this work straddles the borders of didacticism, the small bronze-cast sculpture ‘Criewener No. 104,’ (2022) mounted on the wall next to the growing plants, is perhaps the more compelling piece of the puzzle. The stalk was grown from the seeds of an old original grain type, which is now rarely planted, making of it an invaluable artwork, an encased and aestheticized relic that points to the grain’s rapid obsolescence.
Tue Greenfort: ‘Criewener No. 104,’ 2022 // Courtesy of Tue Greenfort, König Galerie, © Tue Greenfort, photo by Davy Denke, Rytter & Denke, Vejle Kunstmuseum
Carefully ascending the winding and irregular staircase that connects the exhibition to its second floor, I see a large, seed-shaped inflatable emerging from the next room. Kapwani Kiwanga’s ‘Vivarium: Apogamy’ (2020) is a PVC sculpture that mimics a portable 19th-century terrarium, which formally examines how botany and colonial ecology shape the environment.
Its reference, the 19th-century glass “Wardian case,” was used to colonize and safely transport plant specimens from their native habitats to other parts of the world. Here, Kiwanga’s ‘Vivarium’ reverses this dynamic. The subtitle of the work, ‘Apogamy,’ refers to the process of asexual reproduction in plants, bypassing fertilization, and serves as a botanical metaphor in her work, pointing to themes of mutation and the autonomous adaptation of nature to external, often harmful, human interventions.
Kapwani Kiwanga: ‘Vivarium: Apogamy,’ 2020, installation view in ‘Seeds. Reclaiming Roots, Sowing Futures,’ 2026 at KunstHausWien // Courtesy of KunstHausWien, photo by Iris Ranzinger
Mounted on the wall behind the inflatable, the woven wool and glazed ceramic tapestry ‘Seedbank’ (2020) contains replicas based on African rice and furthers Kiwanga’s interest in the racial and colonial dimensions of botany. Described as “silent witnesses to the slave trade,” the grains depicted in the piece address histories of racist exploitation and slavery in both the agriculture and textile industries, and point to quiet methods of resistance.
Navigating the makeshift exhibition walls, I find myself in a quiet corner of the exhibition, where Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña’s video ‘Semiya (Seed Song)’ (2015) is projected on the wall, alongside a written translation of her early poem ‘Semiya (On Behalf of Seeds),’ upon which the film is loosely based. In the poem, Vicuña recounts proposing a “seed day” to transform urban areas into gardens to then-President Salvador Allende, who responds that the time is not yet ripe for this action. The play on words in both the video and poem—”semiya” instead of the Spanish word for seed “semilla”—encompasses this “semi” or “not yet” in which Vicuña’s practice often dwells. The poetic and unspeakable can be strongly felt in her video work, in which she carefully collects endangered seeds from the Andes, the land of her parents and ancestors, while chanting a moving lament.
Cecilia Vicuña: ‘Semiya (Seed Song),’ 2015, film still // Courtesy of the artist and KunstHausWien
What lingers after ‘Seeds. Reclaiming Roots, Sowing Futures’ is not a sense of resolution, but of ongoing fragility and persistent struggle. In the show, seeds emerge not only as hopeful metaphors for survival and renewal, but as carriers of memory and resistance, too. Addressing the Klima Biennale’s theme, ‘Unspeakable Worlds,’ the show’s strongest works resist the urge to neatly explain environmental degradation, instead dwelling in its ambiguities, grief and latent possibilities. By turning to poetry, ancestral knowledge and fraught botanical histories, many of the artists in ‘Seeds’ remind us that imagining viable futures may first require interpreting the more charged and ineffable features of this crisis, and experiencing them on a level of heightened sensitivity.
Exhibition Info
Kunsthaus Wien
Group Show: ‘Seeds. Reclaiming Roots, Sowing Futures’
Exhibition: Apr. 10, 2026-Feb. 14, 2027
kunsthauswien.com
Untere Weißgerberstraße 13, 1030 Vienna, Austria, click here for map
