“Just because something is out of reach doesn’t mean it’s beyond what we can be touched by.” — Karen Barad

For 990000, Marine Kaiser moves within the geology of NICC and enters the materiality of its functioning.

Ambiance paint, mop attachments, smoke machine, screws; objects making exhibitions and remaining behind walls and curtains are surfacing from the storage to its vitrine.

In this intervention, Marine Kaiser exposes the conditions that give access to art, the conditions that make art. Artist-run spaces like NICC operate through layers of often unacknowledged labour: installing, repairing, archiving, cleaning, organising, hosting. These gestures remain secondary to the polished neutrality expected of the exhibition space — the white walls, the invisible cables, the controlled light. The institutional promise of the ‘white cube’ relies on this careful disappearance.

Marine Kaiser collapses the distinction between artwork and context, foreground and background, production and presentation. What is usually treated as peripheral becomes central; what is hidden becomes exposed. Kaiser invites us to reconsider what counts as the artwork, what remains backstage, and how the labour that sustains artistic production might reclaim visibility and force.

Her practice examines how people navigate shifting social and economic systems; tracing networks of circulation, borders, and in/formal infrastructures. 

The intervention does not dismantle or hide the institution. Instead, it makes visible the relations that sustains it: objects, gestures, maintenance, decisions, compromises. There is no neutral space, no zero point outside of context. Art is always produced within infrastructures: the social, the material, the economic.

The vitrine becomes the space where the institution has to show its own hand.