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Adrián Villar Rojas (Untitled) The Language of the Enemy

24 June 2025

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This November, Adrián Villar Rojas will unveil (Untitled) The Language of the Enemy, a new sculpture that conjures a fictionalised prehistory—an imagined moment when Neanderthals and Homo sapiens first collaborated in the invention of meaning. 

Co-commissioned by Aspen Art Museum and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, the work envisions a scene from deep time, in which an encounter with fossilised dinosaur remains might have sparked the earliest act of art-making.

“(Untitled) The Language of the Enemy”

Villar Rojas’s practice unfolds through collaborative fabulation, constructing speculative worlds across sculpture, drawing, video, literature, and performative systems of making. In this new work, he proposes a theoretical history that challenges prevailing anthropocentric narratives of human exceptionalism. While symbolic creation—language, art, ritual—has long been considered an invention of Homo sapiens, recent findings suggest Neanderthals may have engaged in such meaning-making practices before us.

The artist imagines this ancient encounter as a transmission: that what we consider the foundation of human culture may have been inherited from a now-vanished branch of the human lineage. In this frame, the birth of art is not a triumph of our species, but a gift from another.

What if we could see and think of ourselves - humanity - from an alien perspective; detached, unprejudiced, acultural? What if we could think of ourselves from the borders of our own completed path?

Adrián Villar Rojas

Artist

The commission will be first presented in the Jura Mountains, within the renowned Vallée de Joux—the birthplace of Swiss horology—before traveling to Aspen Art Museum in summer 2026 as part of a multi-floor exhibition of Villar Rojas’ site-specific new works. With its presentation in the Vallée de Joux—a region whose limestone formations housed the first-studied Jurassic fossils—(Untitled) The Language of the Enemy draws a parallel between paleontology and speculative memory. It is both a return to origins and a projection into alternate futures.

This marks the first time Audemars Piguet Contemporary has premiered a commission in the Vallée de Joux, and the first joint commission with Aspen Art Museum. Both Aspen Art Museum and Audemars Piguet Contemporary share a commitment to supporting artists in research and creation, fostering imaginative thinking for global audiences in dialogue with place, history, and time.

Landscape of the Vallée de Joux

Visit THE Exhibition

Adrián Villar Rojas’ Untitled (The Language of the Enemy) will be on view in the Vallée de Joux starting in November 2025. More details will be available soon. 

A second presentation will follow in summer 2026 at the Aspen Art Museum (Aspen, Colorado) as part of a multi-floor exhibition of Villar Rojas’ work.

Adrián Villar Rojas’s "(Untitled) The Language of the Enemy" explores the first manifestations of the ability to imagine and fantasise. Debuting the work in the Vallée de Joux, an important region for paleoethological research, raises questions about the way in which we consider the narrative surrounding our cultural foundations. Accompanying the process of building this speculative fiction reinforces Audemars Piguet Contemporary’s commitment to supporting works that challenge our vision of the world we live in. We are proud to present Adrián’s work together with Aspen Art Museum, our co-commissioner and the site for this work’s presentation next summer.

Audrey Teichmann

Curator, Audemars Piguet Contemporary

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Adrián Villar Rojas

Adrián Villar Rojas was born in Rosario, Argentina in 1980. He lives and works nomadically. Villar Rojas has been the recipient of numerous awards including Sharjah Biennial Prize, awarded by the Sharjah Art Foundation (2015), The Zurich Art Prize at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv (2013); the 9th Benesse Prize in the 54th Venice Biennale, (2011); the Nuevo Banco de Santa Fe Scholarship for Young Artists (2006); and the first prize in the Bienal Nacional de Arte de Bahía Blanca at the Contemporary Art Museum of Bahía Blanca, Argentina (2005). In 2020 he was shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize. 

Recent solo exhibitions include Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2022); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, (2022); Tank Shanghai, China (2019); the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada (2018); The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles (2017); NEON Foundation at Athens National Observatory, Athens (2017); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2017) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017); the Moderna Museet, Sweden (2015); the Serpentine Gallery, London (2013); the Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland (2013); and the Musée du Louvre, Paris (2011).

Participation in international group exhibitions include Dance With Daemons, Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2024); 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); 12th and 13th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2020 and 2018); 14th and 12th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2015 and 2012); 12th Havana Biennial, Cuba (2015); 12th Sharjah Biennial, Kalba, United Arab Emirates (2015); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel and Kabul (2012); and 54th Venice Biennale, Argentina’s National Pavilion, Italy (2011).