Adrián Villar Rojas
The End of Imagination III, 2024
installation, topographic forensic reconstruction of Apollo 11 landing site comprised of layered composites of organic, inorganic, human and machine-made materials including recreation of NASA’s “R5” Valkyrie android with parasitic structures attached; scale reproduction of Michelangelo’s “David”; replicas of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s extravehicular boots, visors, gloves, 16 mm Maurer Data Acquisition Film Camera and 70 mm Hasselblad Data Acquisition Photo Camera; replica of Soviet Luna Probe 2; AK-47 and M16 assault rifles; F1 Grenade; embroidered flags of speculative mergers between nation-states and corporate entities
Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. With the generous support of Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles.
The End of Imagination III is a newly reconfigured installation for The Secession. It features a recreation of the famous 1969 moon landing platform, upon which two lunar glitched pillars (over which two flags are draped), are placed, as well as a NASA Lunar Exploration Robot.
Via this tableaux, Villar Rojas wonders how the Moon, Mars, or any other extra-terrestrial landscapes brought to us by interplanetary conquest will affect our past, present and future monumentality and its memorialization. What will happen when our terrestrial fictions, cementing nations and identities, travel to outer space? Will the stories of the Greco-Latin gods, of European Empires, of Spanish Conquistadors, or even of the United States itself, survive as we know them, as we shaped them in books, museums, anthems and monuments, or will they mutate with the radical change of context? And what will happen with the new stories to come, the ones needed to build the first communes that will inhabit planets?
Adrián Villar Rojas (Rosario, AR, 1980. 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 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.
He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Sharjah Biennial Prize (Sharjah, UAE, 2015), the Zurich Art Prize at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv (Zurich, CH, 2013) and the 9th Benesse Prize in the 54th Venice Biennale (Venice, IT, 2011).
Recent exhibitions include The End of Imagination, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, AU (2022); El fin de la imaginación, The Bass, Miami, US (2022); Poems for Earthlings, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam (2019); The Theater of Disappearance, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, US (2017); NEON at Athens National Observatory, GR (2017); Kunsthaus Bregenz, AT (2017); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, US (2017).
