Soil and Water, Exhibition, Pretoria, South Africa
A group exhibition with talks and screennings at the University of Pretoria
University of Pretoria, South Africa
The modular platform Soil & Water, developed and curated by Basak Senova and Johan Thom in collaboration with the NIROX Foundation, unfolds at the University of Pretoria from 18–21 April 2026. Bringing together an international group of artists and researchers, the program features panels, talks, screenings, installations, and walkabouts with contributors including Shaken Grounds Collective (Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil, Victor Jaschke, Peter Kozek, Werner Möbius, Lucie Strecker), Alet Pretorius, Atul Bhalla, Jesper Just, Robin Rhode, and SUPERFLEX. As part of the program, the Shaken Grounds Collective presents a screening of their film work, alongside their installed works on the University campus. Additional installations include works by Inma Herrera, Lundahl & Seitl, Francesco Bellina, and Rojda Tugrul. Soil & Water engages with the ecological entanglements of water and soil through exhibitions, residencies, and research, creating a dynamic platform for cross-disciplinary exchange.
The Shaken Grounds project brings together artists, scientists, and curators to explore how the Earth’s tremors are entangled with culture and technology. Not only natural but also anthropogenic forces amplify seismic processes: climate change is altering the global water cycle in ways whose consequences remain unforeseeable. Profound effects can be observed in soils and groundwater, in ocean currents and rising sea levels, and in tectonic processes deep within the Earth.
Working across geological as well as historical and social layers, the project understands seismography as a form of artistic research. Disciplines such as geology, performance art, and filmmaking meet with somatic practices to perceive, and relate bodies, technologies, and the Earth itself. Rather than functioning as measurement alone, seismography becomes a situated and embodied practice of sensing and witnessing human-induced tremors in the ground on which we stand today.
The film Shaken Grounds, Shifting Skies traverses the volatile terrains of Campi Flegrei, Mount Vesuvius, Vulcano Island, and the retreating Pasterze Glacier in Austria, interwoven with studio scenes and reflective questions. Built on a dialogical principle, each scene opens with a question, not as rhetoric, but as an aperture, asking where and how we find ground when the crust beneath us is trembling. The artists weave vignettes and micro-narratives into a non-linear fabric in which scenes pose questions and questions become scenes. On view is a ten-minute excerpt from an ongoing feature-length work tracing connections between precarity, ecology, geology, time, and life in shaken times.
