Underneath the Paving Stone

Underneath the Paving Stone begins with a set of urgent, interwoven questions: How do built environments, institutional structures, and historical forces shape us as subjects? In what ways are art and life mutually implicated—especially under conditions of crisis, constraint, or repression—and how might artistic freedom be exercised or reimagined within such contexts?

Bringing together artists from diverse geographies and generations, the exhibition offers a multifaceted inquiry into the politics of public space and the ideological operations of infrastructure. Through varied artistic methodologies, these works critically engage the systems—spatial, social, and symbolic—that organize collective life, attending closely to the fractures and absences that render them permeable.

Rather than offering prescriptive answers, the exhibition foregrounds the aesthetic and political potential of art to reveal, resist, and reconfigure the conditions under which we live. It interrogates the entangled ecological, technological, economic, and cultural dynamics that shape not only patterns of movement and exchange but also the very possibility of expression and relation.

In an era marked by intersecting global crises, Underneath the Paving Stone asks what it means to imagine, create, and act together—and whether art might illuminate the spaces, however narrow, where new forms of solidarity and freedom can take root.

Image: Yuko Mohri, Shinjuku Station, November 2, 2015. Digital C-print 100 x 66, 6 cm. From the series Moré Moré Tokyo (Leaky Tokyo): Fieldwork, 2009-2021.

Curator: Karin Bähler Lavér

Work for Public Market Square

Anders Hergum. Work for Public Market Square, 2025
Aluminium
604 × 235 × 8 cm

Anders Hergum explores what construction can be when understood as an open, negotiable language—one in which spaces are created so they can be changed, shared, and reclaimed. In Underneath the Pavingstone, he gestures at how modular structures made from reused materials can articulate a different architectural logic: one that does not dominate its surroundings but instead invites collaboration and movement. The new piece Work for Public Market Square, conceived specifically for the façade of the art hall, centres the building itself as a motif and functions as a material signal of the spatial investigation taking place within the walls. Work for Public Market Square points toward a public realm in flux, where art does not merely present something, but continues to think, build, and act over time.

Work for Public Market Square

Conversation on the exhibition Underneath the Paving Stone

Image gallery