For Adrián Villar Rojas: The Language of the Enemy, his debut solo exhibition in Korea to coincide with Frieze Seoul, the Art Sonje Centre is transformed into a sculptural exploration of time and space. Presented at a moment when humanity hovers on the brink of its own survival, Villar Rojas’s practice unfolds in the threshold between disappearance and legacy.

At the core of the exhibition lies a constellation of hybrid, fantastical sculptures from Villar Rojas’s ongoing series The End of Imagination (2022–present), whose uncanny forms evoke relics unearthed from an unknowable future. Previously shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2022), the Helsinki Biennial (2023), and Fondation Beyeler (2024), the series originates from the artist’s “Time Engine”, a custom-built digital simulation that fuses video game technology, artificial intelligence, and speculative world-making. This tool generates imagined worlds inhabited by shifting life forms, architectures, ecosystems, and sociopolitical structures.

The artist said: “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.”

The show will be on view from 3 September 2025 to 1 February 2026 and Art Sonje Center will stage a talk featuring Adrián Villar Rojas in conjunction with the exhibition on 6 September.

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Images: Adrián Villar Rojas, The Theater of Disappearance, 2017. The End of Imagination I, 2022. Installation view, Dancing With All: The Ecology of Empathy 2025; © Adrián Villar Rojas & Jörg Baumann. Photo: by Jörg Baumann; Portrait of Adrián Villar Rojas. Photo: Mario Caporali