The Language of the Enemy

For Adrián Villar Rojas: The Language of the Enemy, the artist's first solo exhibition in Korea, the Art Sonje Center is reimagined as a sculptural experiment in time and space. 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. Reflecting on the exhibition title, the artist says: “When I speak of The Language of the Enemy, I’m pointing toward a deep prehistory of meaning-making. We, Homo sapiens, didn’t invent symbolism in isolation; we evolved alongside other human relatives. Tools, gestures, fire—but also the first sparks of symbolic thought, of meaning creation. The exhibition’s title gestures to that paradox: the enemy—this manifestation of pure otherness—is alien and threatening. Today, I think we are again at such a threshold—facing new “others,” synthetic intelligences, whose languages we barely comprehend. These intelligences are here, coexisting with us; we pass knowledge to them, even as we sense that, in doing so, we may be preparing for our own disappearance.” At the heart of the exhibition is 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. Adrián Villar Rojas (b. 1980, Rosario, Argentina. Lives and works nomadically) conceives long term projects, collectively and collaboratively produced, that take the shape of large-scale and site-specific installations, both imposing and fragile. Within his research, which mixes sculpture, drawing, video, literature and performative traces, the artist explores the conditions of a humanity at risk, on the verge of extinction or already extinct, tracing the multi-species boundaries of a post-anthropocene time folded in on itself, in which past, present and future converge. Selected solo exhibitions include the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2022); The Bass, Miami (2022); The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles (2017); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2017); and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017). He has also been featured in major international group exhibitions and biennials at the Pinault Collection, Paris (2024); the 12th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2018); Documenta (13), Kassel and Kabul (2012); The New Museum Triennial, New York (2012); and the 54th Venice Biennale, Argentina's National Pavilion, Italy (2011).