BETWEEN EXTINCTION AND LEGACY: ADRIÁN VILLAR ROJAS IN KOREA
For his first solo exhibition in Korea, Adrián Villar Rojas reimagines Art Sonje Center as a sculptural experiment in time and space.
This expansive environmental commission by Adrián Villar Rojas (b. 1980, Rosario, Argentina) dismantles the institutional apparatus of Art Sonje Center to transform the building into a sculptural ecosystem. For Villar Rojas, the museum becomes not a site of preservation, but one of decomposition, mutation, and inheritance—by non-human, post-human, and synthetic agents. Exhibition space becomes terrain: feral, unstable, indifferent to spectatorship.
For the first time in Art Sonje Center's history, a site-specific installation will occupy all four floors, including corridors, stairwells, restrooms, the cinema, and peripheral spaces. The entrance will be blocked by a mound of earth; all temporary partitions will be removed, and walls and columns will be stripped to their core. Soil, fire, and plant life will be introduced, exposing the institution to the outside world and blurring boundaries between interior and exterior, ecological and institutional. Exit signs will become ambient lighting, while humidity and temperature controls will be dismantled, subjecting the building to external thermodynamic forces.
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Adrián Villar Rojas. Untitled 1, from the series The End of Imagination, 2023. Live simulation of active digital ecologies, and layered composites of organic, inorganic, human and machine-made matter. Installation view of Helsinki Biennial, 2023. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jörg Baumann
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Adrián Villar Rojas. The End of Imagination VI, 2024. Live simulation of active digital ecologies, and layered composites of organic, inorganic, human and machine-made matter. Installation view at Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland, 2024. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jörg Baumann
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Adrián Villar Rojas. The End of Imagination III, 2022. Live simulation of active digital ecologies, and layered composites of organic, inorganic, human and machine-made matter. Installation view at The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 2022. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jörg Baumann
At the heart of the exhibition will be a constellation of chimerical sculptures from Villar Rojas's ongoing series The End of Imagination (2022–ongoing), whose haunting, otherworldly forms appear excavated from an unknowable future. First presented at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2022), Helsinki Biennial (2023), and Fondation Beyeler (2024), the series stems from the artist's "Time Engine"—a bespoke digital simulation tool that merges video game engines, artificial intelligence, and speculative world-building. The Time Engine generates synthetic worlds populated by evolving life forms, architectures, ecologies, and sociopolitical conditions.
Emerging at a moment when humanity teeters at the edge of its own continuity, Villar Rojas's work inhabits the liminal space between extinction and inheritance. This exhibition is the culmination of Villar Rojas's long-standing engagement with Korea, including the Real DMZ Project (2014–ongoing), the 5th Anyang Public Art Project (2016), and the Gwangju Biennale (2018, 2021).
For the Art Sonje Center exhibition, a team of eleven long-time collaborators traveled from Argentina to Seoul to fabricate the exhibition on site for six weeks. Operating as a hybrid between hive mind, theater troupe, and terraforming agency, the team is transforming Art Sonje Center into a hand-made, living ecosystem.
Adrián Villar Rojas: The Language of the Enemy will be on display from September 3 to February 1 at Centro Art Sonje, 87 Yulgok-ro 3-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul (Korea).
