The exhibition begins by turning architecture into an encounter. We enter a house and our view is obscured by a curtain. Its translucent fabric is patterned with a soft grey-beige grid reminiscent of the transparency grid used in digital design software. Hana Miletić’s Untitled [Softwares] refers to the technical process of Jacquard weaving and its foundational role in the development of early computing. The grid, alternating between loose unraveled elements and uniform weaving, transforms the curtain from a functional architectural element into a surface that invites closer attention. A curtain has an inherent air of privacy. Yet, like Miletić’s work, it encourages curiosity, and can offer some form of revelation when raised or peeked behind. Miletić asks, what is the relationship between the grid and its production? What systems of production and labor are revealed through the fabric?

A different relationship between function and form appears in Not Vital’s sopcha ‘Jon’, Romansch for “John’s chair”. The work is a marble sculpture composed of two elements that together function as a chair while simultaneously taking on the abstract form of two houses. A gable roof forms the backrest of the chair in a nonchalant gesture. Vital plays with our relationship to familiar forms and transforms everyday structures such as houses, chairs and staircases into something uncanny or unexpectedly monumental.

Facing the visitor in the “Kuhstall”, House to Watch the Sunset for Lamu is a model of one of Vital’s best-known series. The house relinquishes its conventional role as a place of shelter and instead becomes a place of observation and childlike imagination. Its long staircase leads towards an elevated viewpoint, lending the work an almost spiritual quality.

In contrast, the staircases depicted in Petra Wunderlich’s black-andwhite photographs of religious institutions in New York, such as Manhattan/NYC (Congregation Zichron Moshe), are resolutely functional. Fire escapes have become an iconic feature of New York’s architecture, reflecting the city’s dense urban fabric and the fire safety regulations that shaped it. Yet, framed by Wunderlich’s camera, the structures are rendered sculptural and align with the geometric forms found in the exhibition. Observed from the outside, a house is an exclusionary form. Its walls define the boundary between those who belong and those who remain outside, while the fire escape reveals the vulnerability of that boundary.

A floor above, the large-scale sculpture House is constructed of bare canvases and glass. Vital’s monumental work collapses the distinction between a dwelling and a studio and, in doing so, extends the exhibition’s interest in the house as a structure shaped by the conditions of labor and artistic production. Vital’s transformation of the house into a place of contemplation continues in Wolfgang Laib’s Rice House across the hall, in the gallery’s “Sulèr”. The work draws from Laib’s life-long interest in non-Western cultures and his interest in natural materials as a form of communication beyond language.

Through a different approach to cultural memory, Kasper Bosmans reinvents stories and myths, referencing both high art and popular culture in his work. His painting Legend: House of Habsburg, House of Drag playfully juxtaposes one of Europe’s longest-ruling dynasties with the camp sensibility of drag culture.

Augustas Serapinas uses archaic forms, imbuing them with new meaning. Drawing on the vernacular language of everyday architecture and domestic objects, he explores their cultural significance while shifting their original function into new spatial contexts. Here, a pediment no longer supports a roof, the roof no longer offers shelter, and the stove no longer serves to heat the home; instead, these displaced architectural elements draw attention to the social and political changes that reshape domestic living spaces.

Displayed within Chesa Madalena, a house that likewise bears visible traces of its own history, Serapinas’ works invite a dialogue between the building and the objects it contains. Installed in the kitchen, Hamish Fulton’s Outline of the Cooking Pot, Sardinia 2014 resonates with the room’s original function, while Balthasar Burkhard’s photograph of a Cuban bar introduces another kind of interior, extending the domestic space into a more public setting.

Through oblique aerial perspectives from a helicopter, Burkhard’s photographs of megacities such as Mexico City, reveal the structure of the urban landscape. The expansive black-and-white view invites the viewer to immerse themselves in the city’s intricate details, while remaining conscious of the abstraction created by distance and scale.

In another context, we find Table of Feathers by Bethan Huws turning to artistic production through the familiar setting of a writing desk. The feathers, reminiscent of quill pens used for writing well into the nineteenth century, transform the tabletop into a kind of forest. Nature and culture come together and unsettle the table’s conventional function as a place of work. The work can be read as a refusal of productivity, allowing imagination to take precedence over utility. In the context of “House”, the simple wooden desk in the center of the room may allow us to think about the material conditions that make artistic production possible.

In the same room, Andrea Büttner’s Curtain offers a poignant conclusion. Blue and white striped curtains are drawn aside, revealing a blackness at the centre that could be read equally as a view into or out of a house. The work resists the certainty promised by the opening: are we looking into a private space, or has the work positioned us as the ones being observed? Like much of Büttner’s practice, Curtain turns a humble, everyday object into a meditation on vulnerability and the act of looking. The woodcut, with its deliberately simple, handcrafted language, gives weight to what Büttner calls “little” things, suggesting that even the most ordinary threshold can become a site where boundaries are continually negotiated.