The exhibition brings together a constellation of sculptures from Villar Rojas’s series The End of Imagination, whose haunting, otherworldly forms appear excavated from an unknowable future. This is his first exhibition in Norway and the first major presentation of these works in Europe.
In 2020, Villar Rojas and his team developed the Time Engine, a software system designed to explore the conditions of imagined worlds. Combining procedural modelling, simulations of environmental and material processes, and speculative models of economies, societies and conflict, the system terraforms detailed synthetic worlds. Across periods ranging from hours to millions of years, organisms, architecture, machines and geological matter are shaped by changing climates, systems of exchange, struggles over resources, and the emergence or collapse of civilisations. The artist develops the conditions within which these worlds evolve, drawing sculptural forms from the histories that unfold within them.
The End of Imagination belongs to a long history of human attempts to think beyond our limits. Gods, art and mathematics have allowed finite minds to conceive of realities they cannot directly experience. Yet every sculpture depends on human judgement, material knowledge and collective labour to come into being. At a moment when AI promises or threatens to automate creation, Villar Rojas makes the act of bringing something into the world insistently visible. Who imagines, who builds, and who determines the conditions of creation remain profoundly human questions.
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