When the Museum of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, began planning a campus expansion to add a building for contemporary art almost a decade ago, two abandoned World War II-era giants It was not clear what would become of the building. Oil tank under the new site. The museum’s answer is to leave it up to the artists. Transforming one of his tanks into a vast and mind-boggling gallery his space, handed over to the dark and imaginative Argentinian installation artist Adrián Villar Rojas. For big exhibitions. This facility called “The End of Imagination” sydney modern project.
Visitors enter the airy new building Japanese architect SANAA, then descends from the sunlit atrium via a spiral staircase to the tank—and the apocalyptic or post-human universe—that is, classic Villar Rojas territory. A biennial circuit favourite, who, as The Times critic Jason Farago wrote, combines “a sci-fi writer’s imagination with an ecologist’s angst,” Villar Rojas suggests plants and animals. I installed a sculpture inside the tank that might be, but upon closer inspection, it’s not from Earth.
Curator Justin Peyton, who organized the commission, said, “As you wander through the landscape, you come across sculptures so bizarre and detailed and so contradictory and intricate that each of them is made up of hundreds of objects combined. “He creates a world for itself. I think the real world looks strange when the visitor comes out of this space.”
Paton, who also curated the first show called “Dreamhome,” said the SANAA building will showcase contemporary and indigenous art by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The existing neoclassical building of the Art Gallery of New South Wales remains home to a previous collection dating back to paintings by old European masters.
Known for working in political venues, including Trotsky’s last house in Istanbul and Naval Academy in Buenos Aires turned into an internment camp, Villar Rojas said he was particularly interested in the contrast between oil tanks as “war shadow spaces” and sunny celebrations of “colonialist” cultural relics in museums above ground. “It’s like connecting the conscious and unconscious sides of the same empire project,” he wrote in an email from his home in Rosario, Argentina.
The 24,000-square-foot oil tank was built during World War II to fuel Allied warships when Singapore was vulnerable to Japanese attack. By the time they were discovered in 2014, they were flooded and their concrete walls and columns had a patina of petroleum, salt, and mineral blooms.
When Villar Rojas first visited four years ago, he was struck by the tank’s sheer scale, reverberant acoustics and dramatic lighting. “The shadows created by the light hitting the pillars reminded me of being in a pitch-black forest with nothing but a torch,” he recalls. He designed a special lighting display to recreate the experience for visitors.
To create the installation in his studio in Rosario, Villar Rojas assembled a large team of collaborators, including computer programmers, welders and carpenters. The programmer created a computerized model of the oil tank and built what he called a highly detailed “digital twin with all the pillars, stains and shadows.” His mother found a building that was once used to manufacture air conditioning units, but it was big enough to manufacture.
His team also invented a new modeling software called Time Engine. It is a method of virtual aging of an object that digitally simulates the effect of a specific environment on the sculptural form over time. “What if Rodin’s ‘The Kiss’ was left in the Jurassic jungle for 500 years?” he wrote. “What about his mug of coffee that I designed, or his car, or the piece of my design that was left in the canyon? Marineris Vallis on Mars What will 15,000 years look like?
He used the 3D digital forms generated by such experiments to construct artwork that was sent to Sydney. Patton, who called them “mysterious monsters,” said they would remain in place for almost a year before the next artist was invited to the oil tank.