Julian Charrière

Julian Charrière (b. 1987, Morges, Switzerland) is a French-Swiss artist based in Berlin whose work bridges the realms of environmental science and cultural history. Marshalling performance, sculpture and photography, his projects often stem from fieldwork in remote locations with acute geophysical identities – such as volcanoes, ice-fields and radioactive sites. To date, his works has explored post-romantic constructions of ‘nature’, and staged tensions between deep or geological timescales and those relating to humankind. Charrière’s approach further reflects upon the mythos of the quest and its objects in a globalised age. Deploying seemingly perennial imagery to contemporary ends, his interventions at the borderline of mysticism and the material encapsulate our fraught relations with place today.

A former student of Olafur Eliasson and participant of the Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments), Charriére has exhibited his work – both individually and as a part of the Berlin-based art collective Das Numen – at museums and institutions worldwide, including at the Parasol Unit Foundation for Art in London; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne in Switzerland; Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin; Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna; Thyssen Bornemizsa Art Contemporary in Vienna; Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin; The Reykjavik Art Museum in Iceland; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo; The Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India; and at the the 12th Biennale de Lyon in France. In 2012, Charrière collaborated with the artist Julius von Bismarck on the site-specific performance piece Some Pigeons Are More Equal Than Others for the 13th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.

More info: www.julian-charriere.net