In an age of real-time communication and constant connectivity, it has paradoxically become harder than ever to truly hear one another. Surrounded by signals, screens, and simultaneous voices, we often find ourselves caught in a deafening cacophony of noise so thick we can no longer distinguish meaning. Vhils’ installation, composed of sculpted antennas, raises the question: what happens when the every tools meant to connect us end up fragmenting our sense of dialogue, of community, of shared space?

Once common on rooftops and balconies, satellite antennas were physical markers of communication - modest monuments of a pre-digital world. As cities modernize and satellites replace old infrastructure, these objects have fallen into disuse. And yet, even as the physical mesh of communication disappears from sight, our cities become more saturated with invisible data, surveillance, and digital noise. Vhils resurrects these obsolete forms to reflect on what has been lost in the shift toward the seamless and instantaneous. Almost archaic in form, the antennas are literal representations of globalisation and metaphorical carriers of a tangled, fractured system.

Sculpted using the artist’s signature bas-relief carving technique (as well as other sort of interventions), each antenna bears the marks of Vhils’ hand, transforming industrial detritus into something uniquely human. His process - removing layers of surfaces instead of adding to them - is an act of excavation, both physical and symbolic. Just as he carves into the walls of cities around the world, revealing their accumulated layers of history and identity, here he carves into cast-off elements of urban infrastructure. The antennas become surfaces of memory, of interference, of contradiction.

Vhils first developed this approach more than 20 years ago after encountering the political murals of post-revolutionary Portugal. Rather than paint over them, he chose to dig through the city’s skin, exposing what was already there. His technique has become a hallmark of his practice: a method of humanising the urban landscape and engaging in a visual dialogue with the city and its inhabitants. For him, every wall absorbs vibrations, histories, and local character. The same philosophy applies to these antennas, which once received transmissions from across the world and now act as silent witnesses to the changing rhythms of urban life. In the context of Uncommissioned, this work takes on an even more layered meaning. It is not simply a sculpture placed in public space, but a reflection on what public space has become and whom it serves. The antennas shed light into the hidden networks that exist today, the unseen infrastructures that govern how we communicate, move, and exist in contemporary cities. By working with ephemeral materials in an unsanctioned setting, Vhils questions the very nature of monumentality and visibility in the urban environment.

Vhils looks at the daily and fleeting transformations - both tangible and intangible - of cities across the world, shaped by gentrification, modernization, technology, and connection. This is a timely and meaningful opportunity for his work to continue reflecting on the city, now as a questioning element embedded in the urban landscape itself.