Julian Charrière

2.4 billion years ago, more or less, there was no oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere. 2.4 billion years after that, underground at Mona, the French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière has been hard at work in the bedrock, bringing forth a new artwork.

David writes:

Ideas burst from Julian Charrière like licks from an over-friendly dog. Sometimes it’s a lot—attending one of Julian’s exhibitions can be overwhelming. But Julian isn’t a meddler. His ideas are deep and incisive, the sort of ideas that expose the soft white underbelly of reality.

He’s an artist driven by an intrepid spirit that sends him out into the world, traversing volcano ridges and craters from Ethiopia to Sicily to Indonesia for his art; diving in the Pacific Ocean to shed light on a bathypelagic abyss slated for deep sea mining; or crossing the Drake Passage, from South America to Antarctica, horribly seasick from the awesome southern swell—yet ‘somehow cleansed’ by the journey, a rite of passage and purification. Now onwards to Tassie, where he’s marking a descent into deep time, and the concealed worlds beneath our feet. Come and sample sculpture, film, photography and installation from the full breadth of Charrière’s elemental output—where stone grinds, iceberg groans, mountain heaves—bridging nature, science, history, industry, myth and morality. And finally, built into the museum’s foundations, there’s Breathe: a new work that sees the artist harness a scientific process to release oxygen molecules trapped inside banded iron ore since something known as the Great Oxidation Event, all those 2.4 billion years ago; and where you, the visitor, will breathe in this ancient air for the very first time it’s ever been breathed since oxygen appeared.

Such vast stretches of time outscale human endeavour. (Think of Carl Sagan: ‘If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe’; and also, Jorge Luis Borges: ‘Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen.’) Is there something built into us that blinkers our sight of the long view—and would we behave differently if we could see clearly the true cost of our actions and apathy when it comes to things like nature, the warming world and any responsibility we hold for those who will one day regard us as their ancestors? Or are we to remain stuck, wading through the shallows of the here and now? And maybe, just maybe, is this part of why we struggle to apprehend our distant origins as a species; and our place within those vast inhuman energies of geological change that unfold far beyond this human instant, way back when to in-the-beginning and further forward than we can know? Perhaps an artist such as Charrière can lead the way for our imaginations, then our reason, into the deep. We certainly hope so. Beginnings, it’s been said, are apt to be shadowy, misted by remoteness. But you’d also do well to remember, to evoke William Faulkner, via Charrière, that ‘the past is never dead. It’s not even past’.

Curated by Jarrod Rawlins and Olivier Varenne