Julian Charrière (born 1987) is a French-Swiss conceptual artist currently living and working in Berlin. He utilises a wide range of artistic approaches including photography, performance, sculpture, and video to address concepts relating to time and human'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 at the Universität der Künste where he graduated in 2013 from Olafur Eliasson’s Institute of Spatial Experiments.
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 philosophers Dehlia Hannah and 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 human’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 matter as Charrière creates 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 human-made 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 photographs documenting the desolate remnants of the sites developed from analog film exposed to nuclear materials, giving the invisible force of radioactivity a visible presence within the images. Following these voyages Julian Charrière also co-wrote with Nadim Samman - whom he traveled with- As We Used to Float, straddling the genres of travelog and critical essay. Described as: "toggling between a personal account of a sea journey, above and below water, and a critical investigation of postcolonial geography, As We Used to Float develops broader reflections on place and subjectivity".
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 2018 the artist received the Prix Mobilière which honors young artists addressing particularly socially relevant issues and make up new collective perspectives with their positions; as well as the GASAG Kunstpreis, awarded every two years to outstanding artistic positions at the intersection of art, science, and technology. In 2021 he was nominated for the Prix-Marcel-Duchamp, as well as for the Hans-Purrmann-Prize and the Prix de la Fondation Choi pour l’art contemporain. In the beginning of 2021 Charrière was invited by the artists-in-labs KAUST-Swiss Residency Exchange for a three-month Artist Residency in Saudi Arabia.
In addition to working as a solo artist, Charrière has collaborated with other artists, being a member of the Berlin-based artist collective, Das Numen. The collective has shown across Europe and has 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.