NEW YORK, NY.- 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.


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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. 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.


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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. Villar Rojas 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.

Presented 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 palaeontology and speculative memory. It is both a return to origins and a projection into alternate futures.

Emerging—in the artist’s words—in a “moment where the human species teeters at the threshold of its own continuity”, Villar Rojas’ work inhabits the liminal space between extinction and inheritance—between the disappearance of worlds and the possibilities they leave behind. Following its premiere in the Jura Mountains, (Untitled) The Language of the Enemy will travel to Aspen Art Museum in summer 2026 for the artist’s solo exhibition, which will take over two entire floors of the building. 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.

“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

“Adrián Villar Rojas’s works are entire ecosystems in and of themselves, shaped by geological time and speculative futures. Amidst rapidly growing global instability, he creates worlds that force us to imagine and consider the end of the human species and how culture will evolve. Over the past decade, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Adrián on a number of occasions and I am delighted to continue to amplify his critical dialogue with the debut (Untitled) The Language of the Enemy with our collaborator and co-commissioner Audemars Piguet Contemporary in the Vallée de Joux. I look forward to welcoming visitors to Aspen Art Museum in 2026 to see the work as part of our multi-floor exhibition.” —Claude Adjil , Curator-at-Large, Aspen Art Museum

“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 palaeontological 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

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 the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2018); 14th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2015); 12th Bienal de La Habana, La Habana (2015); Sharjah Biennial 12, Kalba (2015); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel and Kabul (2012) and 54th International Art Exhibition: La Biennale di Venezia, Argentina’s National Pavilion, Venice (2011).


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