Planes are held back from reaching their destinations, or perhaps caught heading to a destination of no return. The stasis is somehow impermanent, lasting only until hot tongues of sun from below, like a stove fire, melt the puddles of soap dripping onto the dishes from the sinks and bathtubs. The soap bars are almost too small to fulfill their function. The vastness of space is sucking in unfulfilled promise, the unsustained connection, the pieces of utopia infected with the feral dirt of everyday reality.

Reverse urbanism here is literal in its perception: your feet hold onto the vastness of space, and your head almost touches the roof of the upside-down house. Hold on as you look down at the satellite dish. An upward-looking shallow steel bowl with a tentacle in the middle restlessly sucks in information in different languages: movies, music, news, and colors fill the rooms of people in Vienna. Invisible spear connects to faraway places and manipulates everyday life. But what is being sucked in, if the house is reversed, if the satellite dish is still keeping its gravitational position but now sits just above the cruising altitude of upside-down reality?

 – by Justina Špeirokaitė

The exhibition, set as a literal top-down urbanism, revolves around sculptural ensembles of where inflammation takes over: cold sores appear on the blinds, merging with the 1:1.5 pattern of a house; burns in the carpet-turned-chemtrails trace distances travelled in unstable directions. Houses, with open closets at the ceiling, have become dispatcher huts for celestial navigation, where planes lost or struggling to arrive die in piles near nightstands alongside embracing towel swans and ibuprofen. Green stands for mayday, leading both north and south, while satellites, stuck on sunset time, register starry nights. A bulky guard dog has turned into a white, crusty Maltese. A staircase has fallen from a house and stretched all the way to a waxing crescent moon, a good time for a fresh haircut. 

Exhibition reader contributions by Ieva Raudsepa and Wies de Wit.

07.10-06.11.2026
Improper Walls
Reindorfgasse 42, 1150 Vienna, Austria

Part of bal’26: Dismantling the Promise program

Photography: Simon Veres