A contemporary figure holds a 300 year old Egyptian hippopotamus head in Adrián Villar Rojas’ Met roof graden installation, “The Theater of Disappearance”

Adrián Villar Rojas’ “The Theater of Disappearance” is New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s summer rooftop installation. Sixteen sculptures are arranged throughout the outdoor space, on and around banquet tables and chairs strewn with plates and glasses, the aftermath of some monstrous party. Villar Rojas has chosen pieces of the Met’s mind-bogglingly extensive collection and combined them with likenesses of friends and family [and himself] to create the otherworldly guests. Through the use of laser scanning and photo measurement techniques combined with machine milling and 3D printing, an 18th Century Ganesha tops a girl in trainers who in turn straddles King Haremhab as a royal scribe from 1336 BC. A young man who you might see every day in your local coffee shop sits atop a banqueting table holding a 3000 year old Egyptian Hippo’s head and has upside down disembodied hands (complete with arms) for glasses. Each combined sculpture is finished in the same light or dark material [that reads as stone or bronze or marble] so that they each seem of a piece, in spite of their multiple sources. Villar Rojas’ has freed these works from the museum’s collection and recombined them in exuberant modern mashups, bringing them to life in a way The Met’s traditional methods of display never could.