Artwork: Adrián Villar Rojas, The End of Imagination I (2022) The Theater of Disappearance (2017), 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, 2025
Adrián Villar Rojas’s current installation in the group exhibition Dancing with All: The Ecology of Empathy at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, is an amalgam of two series of works, The Theater of Disappearance from 2017, which had various iterations in Athens, Bregenz and Los Angeles, and the 2020-22 projects, The End of Imagination (I wrote a blog post about the Paris 2020 exhibition).
The element from The Theater of Disappearance series is a large format image of Piero della Francesca’s painting Madonna del Parto (1450-75). The reproduction, depicts a pregnant Madonna, and was originally displayed on the floor at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2017. It is positioned above a large-scale sculptural element from Rojas’s series entitled The End of Imagination, a chaotic amalgamation of software systems collectively described as the “Time Engine” and created to generate a series of digital worlds, a conflation of the virtual and physical. The sculpture’s state of decay implies environmental and social collapses across time.
Themes of extinction, disappearance, organic and inorganic forms, and time meld with ruminations on human imagination, the nature of art, language and systems of representation. With regards to the Theater of Disappearance and The End of Imagination projects, Rojas made a statement that encapsulates both (as well as other works such as Poems for Earthlings, Paris, 2011) in terms of conception and strategy: "In 2010, I proposed a hypothesis: What if, in the final moments of humanity, the last of the species decided they wanted to make an artwork? It would be the last human artwork, together with all the logical implications unfolded by this fact. The end of art, end of the world and end of language are then one and the same thing: the same end. In my fabulations, reaching the shores of art created a vacuum, a silence that gave space for me to explore nonhuman perspectives. This is when I placed a new metaphor of an alien into this terminal landscape. What I call the ‘alien gaze’ expresses this impossible paradox: a subjectivity without culture."