Julian Charrière


Julian Charrière is a conceptual artist currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. He utilizes a range of artistic approaches including photography, performance, sculpture, and video to address concepts relating to time and society's relationship to the natural world.

Early life and education

Charrière was born in Morges, Switzerland to a Swiss father and French mother. He studied art at the École cantonale d’art du Valais in Switzerland before moving to Berlin to finish his degree. In 2013 he graduated from Olafur Eliasson’s Institute of Spatial Experiments in conjunction with the Berlin University of Arts.

Career

Charrière’s research-driven practice fuses together art, science, and anthropology, highlighting the tensions resulting from our modern world. Inspired by land artists such as Robert Smithson as well as writers like author J.G. Ballard and philosopher Timothy Morton, his work contributes to a discussion of social and environmental implications of the advancements which have pushed society forward. These ideas link Charrière to the 19th century Romantic era during which man’s place within the world was reexamined as a response to the industrial revolution and humanist philosophy. Throughout his body of work Charrière experiments with nonconventional materials and methods for the symbolic significance that they carry. Time is an often used material as Charrière produces artworks intended to create and exist within their own timeline while commenting on their place within the broader human timescale.
Interested in the concept of fossils as physical markers of time and more specifically what artifacts will be left behind to shape future generations’ interpretations of his era, Charrière has crafted a “geo-archaeology of the future.” Geological specimens being the only form of documentation of Earth’s early eons, the artist reinterpreted this idea to create the series Metamorphism wherein electronic waste is molten with artificial lava and transformed into natural-looking rocks, essentially returning the technological devices to the raw materials from which they are made. This project is one of several sculptural series by Charrière using natural and manmade materials which provides a physical commentary on the increasingly digitalized world.
Much of his work has been the result of various expeditions around the world, focusing on locations impacted by humanity. Such locations visited by Charrière include the Semipalatinsk Test Site, a former USSR nuclear test site, and its American equivalent, the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Notably from these two voyages came a series of photography documenting the desolate remnants of the sites developed from analogue film exposed to nuclear materials, giving the invisible force of radioactivity a visible presence within the images.
Charrière has been the recipient of several prestigious awards. He was awarded the Kiefer Hablitzel Award during the Swiss Art Awards in both 2013 and 2015. In 2016 Charrière received the Kaiserring Stipendium für junge Kunst which resulted in a solo exhibition at the Mönchehaus Museum Goslar in Germany.
In addition to working as a solo artist, Charrière has collaborated with other artists as well as a member of the Berlin-based artist collective, Das Numen. The collective has shown across Europe and been the recipient of numerous awards. 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 Venice Architecture Biennale. The two have continued to work together, producing several exhibitions in tandem with one another.
The artist became the subject of international news in March 2017 when Berlin police were called to his studio after the testing of his new piece commenting on peaceful scientific development and the dangers of climate change entitled The Purchase of the South Pole. The three-meter long air cannon was originally meant to shoot coconuts from the Bikini Atoll as a part of the first Antarctic Biennale. Because of its seizure the artwork never made it to Antarctica and currently remains in the custody of the German authorities.

Selected exhibitions

Solo exhibitions
Group exhibitions