The visible is merely the surface. In Art Power (2008), Boris Groys observes that museum visitors see “only the surface of the artwork,”^❶ while the systems of maintenance, restoration, and material support that sustain it remain largely behind this surface. Subterranean at Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, curated by Sarah Johanna Theurer and Aditi Kapoor, takes this tension beyond the artwork itself. Across production, finance, communication, migration, and art institutions, the exhibition draws attention to the structures, labor, and costs that are usually relegated to invisibility or treated as background noise, making them part of what is visible.

Upon entering the exhibition, the first work to catch the eye is Marina Xenofontos’s NEW FAITHFUL (2023): Monobloc chairs are positioned over and around a CRT monitor playing footage of the “Lemon Dance,” a tradition carried abroad by Cypriot communities after the island’s division in 1974. What at first glance appears playful holds a history of displacement, while the continuation of the dance keeps a connection to a place left behind.

The chairs imply another history. Produced by the Cypriot plastics manufacturer Lordos United, their marbled white-and-brown surfaces emerged during the brief transition from one color batch to another. Nothing is physically wrong with them. However, the pattern falls outside the standard expected of a mass-produced object, making the chairs difficult to classify and sell. Xenofontos places this commercially rejected commodity beside a history of displacement without making them equivalent. Two different forms of being out of place remain in uneasy proximity.

Ghislaine Leung’s Maintenance (2025) is almost invisible, threading through the entire exhibition rather than occupying one place. Holes, dust, remaining wall labels, installation marks, and worn surfaces have been left where they would normally disappear between exhibitions. Sections behind the white walls are left open, exposing cables and supporting structures. These traces redirect attention from the individual works back to the gallery itself.

After an exhibition, the white cube does not simply return to a “pure” state. It is repeatedly cleaned, repaired, and reset. Leung interrupts that process, revealing neutrality as something continuously produced through labor. The work’s near-invisibility is also precarious. Without knowing what has deliberately been left, some of these traces may register simply as part of the room rather than as an intervention.

In Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi and Andrew Yong Hoon Lee’s The light comes in the name of the voice (movement II) (2026), the invisible takes another form. Steel pipes run along the floor and walls, carrying low voices through the gallery. The work emerged from Nguyen-Chi’s conversation with a former political prisoner who recalled how prisoners in solitary confinement communicated secretly through sewage pipes. Part of the architecture of separation became a way to reach another person.

Among the voices moving through the pipes are passages from Rosa Luxemburg’s prison letters, alongside references to writers, poets, and musicians, including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose own writing repeatedly crosses linguistic and cultural borders. The polyphonic voices suggest how words and sound can travel beyond imposed boundaries. Some pipes, however, remain disconnected, while certain sounds never seem to reach one another. Communication is not guaranteed here.