Julian Charrière

Julian Charrière (born 1987, Morges, Switzerland) is a Swiss-French artist who lives and works in Berlin. His multidisciplinary practice explores the cultural, geological and environmental histories embedded within landscapes, bringing geological and human timescales into contact. Working across film, photography, sculpture and installation, Charrière often develops projects through fieldwork in remote or environmentally charged locations, including glaciers, volcanoes, radioactive sites and deep-sea environments. His works investigate the ways in which human activity has transformed the planet while also considering landscapes as sites of memory, scientific inquiry and cultural imagination. Rather than simply illustrating environmental crisis, Charrière combines empirical observation with speculative and poetic approaches, creating situations in which wonder, uncertainty and ecological awareness coexist. A recurring concern in his practice is the history of exploration and the technologies through which environments have been observed, represented and exploited. Charrière examines the relationship between scientific knowledge, technological progress and the extraction of natural resources, often revealing how apparently neutral acts of exploration are connected to longer histories of colonialism and industrialisation. His works bring together geological processes and human interventions, allowing apparently distant temporalities to overlap. This approach is evident in projects such as *Towards No Earthly Pole*, which considers glaciers as both physical environments and repositories of geological and cultural histories, and *Controlled Burn*, which connects deep geological time, fossil fuels and the industrial infrastructures that have shaped modernity. Water and the deep ocean have become increasingly important subjects in Charrière’s recent work. *Midnight Zone*, first presented as a film in 2024 and subsequently developed into a major exhibition at the Museum Tinguely in Basel in 2025, takes its title from the bathypelagic zone of the ocean, where sunlight disappears and vision becomes impossible. The project brings together film, sound, sculpture and immersive installation to explore the ocean as a largely unseen environment whose ecological systems remain fundamental to planetary life. His 2025 exhibition *Solarstalgia* at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art similarly connected planetary life, industrial modernity and the material history of fossil fuels, bringing together works concerned with ancient ecosystems, plant life, coal and contemporary energy systems. Charrière graduated from the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and participated in Olafur Eliasson’s Institute for Spatial Experiments. His work has been exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions at institutions including Museum Tinguely in Basel, ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Langen Foundation, MAMbo – Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Berlinische Galerie and Parasol Unit. His work has also been presented at the Centre Pompidou, Fondation Beyeler and Mori Art Museum, as well as at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. His project *Weight of Shadows* was presented at the Centre Pompidou in the context of the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2021. In 2024, Charrière was named one of the inaugural recipients of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize awarded by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, alongside Cecilia Vicuña. Each artist received a $100,000 unrestricted honorarium and institutional support to develop a new commissioned project addressing the intersections of art, climate change and environmental justice. Charrière’s resulting MOCA exhibition, *Deep End*, is scheduled for November 2026 and will bring together new and recent works focused on the fragility and resilience of planetary water systems. Across his practice, Charrière continues to examine the material and cultural histories of the planet, using immersive encounters with landscapes and ecosystems to reveal the complex relationships between natural processes, scientific knowledge, technological intervention and human imagination.