Adrián Villar Rojas
Honoree Talk With Claude Adjil and Hans Ulrich Obrist

Adrián Villar Rojas reflects on the broader conceptual and material concerns that underpin his practice in relation to the making of his exhibition First Gods, Lost Animals at Aspen Art Museum, situating it within the unstable relationship between figure and landscape that structures Figures in a Landscape.

Villar Rojas’s work approaches space as something staged and historically charged by inherited ways of seeing, but also continually rewritten through material intervention and projection. Central to the discussion is the figure of the cave, understood as both landscape formation and constructed environment: emerging over vast geological time through deposition and mineral consolidation, while simultaneously inscribed by cultural activity, interpretation, and symbolic framing.

In conversation with Claude Adjil, Curator-at-Large at Aspen Art Museum, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of Serpentine, the talk addresses his interest in speculative histories and non-anthropocentric narratives, including recent work that reconsiders the origins of symbolic thought through interspecies encounter. He returns to questions of scale and perception: how humans construct frameworks—mythological, mathematical, computational—to render complexity navigable, and what is at stake when those frameworks themselves begin to transform. Across these themes, Villar Rojas examines how environments, systems, and material fictions can operate as sites for reconfiguring inherited assumptions about authorship, intelligence, and the evolution of meaning within landscape.

Adrián Villar Rojas was born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1980. He lives and works nomadically. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2025); The Tank, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2022); The Bass, Miami (2022); Oude Kerk, Amsterdam (2019); Tank Shanghai, China (2019); The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles (2017); NEON at the Athens National Observatory, Greece (2017); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2017); and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017).

Recent group exhibitions include Arte Povera, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris (2024); MACHINE LOVE: Video Game, AI and Contemporary Art, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2025); Dancing with All: The Ecology of Empathy, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2024); Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order, WIELS, Brussels (2025); A Time Between Ashes and Roses, Aichi Triennale (2025); Dance with Daemons, Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2024); New Directions May Emerge, Helsinki Biennial, Finland (2023); Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023); Portals, Hellenic Parliament + NEON, Athens (2021); Bruges Triennial, Belgium (2021); the 12th and 13th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2018, 2020); the 2nd Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2020); Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2020); Layers of Time, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019); the 1st Riga Biennial, Latvia (2018); the 12th and 14th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2012, 2015); the 12th Havana Biennial, Cuba (2015); the 12th Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2015); Documenta 13, Kassel and Kabul (2012); the New Museum Triennial, New York (2012); and the 54th Venice Biennale, Argentina’s National Pavilion (2011).

Villar Rojas has received numerous awards, including the Konex Award (2012, 2022); the Sharjah Biennial Prize (2015); the Prix Canson, Paris (2015); the Zurich Art Prize at Museum Haus Konstruktiv (2013); the Benesse Prize at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); the Nuevo Banco de Santa Fe Scholarship for Young Artists (2006); and First Prize at the National Art Biennial of Bahía Blanca, Argentina (2005). In 2020, he was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize.

His 2013 film Lo que el fuego me trajo screened at the Locarno International Film Festival. His 2017 film trilogy The Theater of Disappearance screened at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival.

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Image: Adrián Villar Rojas, First Gods, Lost Animals, 2026. Detail view, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, USA, 2026. Courtesy the artist, Aspen Art Museum, kurimanzutto and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Jörg Baumann