Visual arts take centre stage at the 2025 KKNK (Klein Karoo National Arts Festival), transforming the Karoo into a vast, living canvas of collective memory, myth, and materiality.
Opening Night. © Hans van der Veen
While arts festivals in South Africa are often synonymous with theatre, the 2025 KKNK (sponsored by Absa) reaffirmed the festival’s growing reputation as a fertile space for visual storytelling. This year’s large-scale exhibition, titled ‘Deep Ground / Diepe grond’, was curated by Liza Grobler and unfolded across Oudtshoorn like a map of inner and outer terrains—ecological, personal, political and mythological.
Grobler drew inspiration from Reza de Wet’s 1980s play Diepe Grond (‘Deep Ground’), not as narrative source material, but as a conceptual framework for investigating “the interaction between fact and intuition, the intricacies of interpersonal relationships within the South African landscape, and the interplay between the mundane and the extraordinary.”
Installation view of ‘Deep Ground’. ReWOLusie six-metre fibre sculpture on the wall. Courtesy of the KKNK.
Presented as one expansive, non-compartmentalised group exhibition, ‘Deep Ground’ featured contributions from over 100 artists working across various media. The works flowed from the Prince Vintcent building into Baron van Reede Street and outward to the natural textures of the surrounding veld. “Although various ‘regions’ exist within the exhibition, works are not partitioned,” Grobler explained. “It is simultaneously a celebration of the respective artists, their creative processes and personal insights, and an awareness of how these individual components contribute to a bigger, integrated experience.”
This commitment to integration extended beyond traditional exhibition spaces. Four local primary schools took part in ecological drawing and movement workshops with Henk Serfontein and Hannah Loewenthal. High school learners collaborated with artist Norman O’Flynn to create a striking bridge installation that greeted festivalgoers. The women of ReWOLusie crocheted a six-metre fibre sculpture echoing the majestic red mountains near Calitzdorp, while the Karoo Kaarte initiative partnered with the District Six Museum to present Kiki, an archival exhibition exploring queer memory and identity.
Lien Botha with her work In Afterland (Dürer) on a police station wall. © Raymond Smith
Across two floors and multiple public spaces, artworks responded to the layered geological and emotional terrain of the Karoo. Highlights included Seretse Moletsane’s soil-and-dung paintings sourced from local roads, Sonia Martins Mateus’s durational performance Under the Red Soil, and Zietske Saaiman’s sound and light installation built from calcified riverbed plants. Meanwhile, Lien Botha’s In Afterland (Dürer) transformed a police station wall into an unexpected portal between landscape and art history.
Many works addressed South Africa’s deepening ecological concerns. From questions around water scarcity and resource extraction to speculative reflections on the afterlives of contemporary artefacts, the exhibition embraced what Grobler described as “a spatial experience” that encouraged viewers to wander, reflect, and root themselves in a multisensory, multilayered environment.
Sonia Martins Mateus, Under the Red Soil. © Hans van der Veen
Other standout contributions included a performance by Serfontein and Loewenthal titled Aardmoeder (Earth Mother), an immersive VR installation Toor | Bos by the University of Johannesburg, and a mural by Kilmany-Jo Liversage. The MAPSA collection presented LANDscape[s], curated by Miné Kleynhans, while Absa celebrated 20 years of L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto award winners in a special showcase.
“The viewer becomes an explorer in this landscape,” Grobler wrote in her curatorial statement, “with numerous footpaths that lead to new destinations and offer ample time for self-reflection.”
As the festival prepares to celebrate its 30th edition from 28 March to 4 April in 2026, ‘Deep Ground’ has laid fertile foundations—rooted in place, grown through collaboration, and shaped by the unique textures of the Klein Karoo.
For more information, please visit the KKNK.
