Adrián Villar Rojas: The Language of the Enemy
Installation image for Adrián Villar Rojas: The Language of the Enemy. Photo by Seowon Nam. Courtesy of Art Sonje Center. ⓒ 2025. Art Sonje Center all rights reserved.
Who is the Enemy?
The exhibition title, The Language of the Enemy, starts with a question that has no clear answer: Who or what is the enemy? Is it the artificial intelligences that are developing quickly and changing our understanding of knowledge? Is it the slow decay around us, the forces that gradually weaken our structures and our sense of stability? Or could the enemy be something within us—our urge to take, consume, and disrupt the systems that support life?
Adrián Villar Rojas (b. 1980, Rosario, Argentina) does not provide a clear answer to the question. Instead, he leaves it open, allowing it to affect the walls, hallways, and atmosphere of Seoul’s Art Sonje Centre. The museum stops being a place of permanence and order; it becomes vulnerable to soil, weather, and fire. The threat exists everywhere and nowhere—shifting among technology, nature, and humanity itself.
A Museum Unraveled
We often view museums as spaces of control: air kept at a steady humidity, silence carefully maintained, and objects frozen in time. Villar Rojas dismantles this architecture of stability. Visitors enter not through glass doors but through a mound of earth—a gesture signaling a departure from neutrality. Inside, walls are stripped back to their skeletons; light is scarce, and the building’s hidden functions—its corridors, bathrooms, and staircases—are incorporated into the artwork. The museum is not a container but a body in slow decomposition.
Sculptures from a Future Past
Amidst this instability stand the sculptures from The End of Imagination (2022–ongoing). They rise like fossilized remnants of a world that never fully existed yet feels strangely familiar. Composed of bone, stone, metal, and dust, each form appears less created than excavated. They are artifacts from a collapsed timeline, where natural history, human history, and speculative futures intertwine.
Their origins lie in the Time Engine, Villar Rojas’s custom-built simulation that merges artificial intelligence, video game technology, and speculative design. Within this digital laboratory, ecologies evolve and decay, structures emerge and dissolve. The sculptures seem as if pulled from this shifting matrix—objects straddling the boundary between the digital and the material, the living and the extinct.
Adrián Villar Rojas
Throughout his practice, Villar Rojas has resisted fixed categories. His work does not present stable objects but unstable worlds. Sculpture, architecture, performance, and speculation intertwine, creating environments that feel alive yet fragile, synthetic yet organic. To enter them is to step into a realm where past, present, and future blur—a kind of temporal vertigo.
In The Language of the Enemy, the visitor is more than just a viewer; they actively engage with the space. Moving through the building feels like exploring a living organism or a stressed ecosystem. There is no single viewpoint or reference point—only a continuous adjustment to change.
An Open Question
If the enemy has a language, we may not be able to understand it—or even want to. It speaks through slow decay, through machines that learn on their own, and through nature taking back what we once called civilization. Villar Rojas does not give us a dictionary; instead, he asks us to feel the discomfort of listening.
Adrián Villar Rojas, The End of the Imagination I, 2022. Photo by Seowon Nam. Courtesy of Art Sonje Center. ⓒ 2025. Art Sonje Center all rights reserved .
Installation image for Adrián Villar Rojas: The Language of the Enemy. Photo by Seowon Nam. Courtesy of Art Sonje Center. ⓒ 2025. Art Sonje Center all rights reserved.
Featured
Adrián Villar Rojas
Exhibition
The Language of the Enemy
Art Sonje Centre
Dates
3 September 2025 – 1 February 2026
Curated by
Sunjung Kim (Artistic Director, Art Sonje Centre)
Heehyun Cho (Head of Exhibitions, Art Sonje Centre)
Coordinator
Seowon Nam (Curatorial Assistant, Art Sonje Centre)
Organised by
Art Sonje Centre
Supported by
Arts Council Korea
Sponsored by
Marian Goodman Gallery
kurimanzutto
Photography
Seowon Nam
Words
Nina Zulian