1. Julian Charrière, Pure Waste (Video still), 2021, © 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich, Julian Charrière
With “Midnight Zone”, the Museum Tinguely in Basel dedicates a major solo exhibition to French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière (b. 1987). Spread over three floors, the show immerses visitors in aquatic environments that extend from the Rhine flowing beneath the museum to the abyssal depths of remote oceans.
Water, in this exhibition, is not a passive motif but a medium. The works on view invite us to drift across different states of perception: from glacial suspension to oceanic descent, from liquid fire to fossilized time. Rather than staging a conventional display of environmental catastrophe, Charrière opens spaces for resonance, where wonder and unease, scientific observation and poetic speculation coexist.
Curated by Roland Wetzel and Tabea Panizzi, the exhibition is conceived as a hydrological system in its own right, attuned to the material, political and spiritual dimensions of water. The title refers to the bathypelagic “midnight zone” of the ocean, where sunlight disappears and orientation collapses, a metaphor for the artist’s insistence on inhabiting thresholds. To accompany the show, Museum Tinguely and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg have published “Julian Charrière. Midnight Zone” with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, a volume that gathers contributions from scientists, humanities scholars and essay. This publication not only documents the works exhibited, but expands upon them, offering a multifaceted reflection on water as archive, solvent, and signal.
In Basel, the exhibition unfolds as a hydrological cycle in itself: moving between films, sculptures, sound installations and photographic works, it channels an entire world of flows and sediments.
2. Portrait of Julian Charrière, 2025, Museum Tinguely, Basel by Matthias Willi
Biography
Julian Charrière was born in 1987 in Morges, Switzerland, and studied at the Berlin University of the Arts under Olafur Eliasson. His career has been marked by an engagement with sites of ecological and geopolitical intensity: the cryosphere, volcanic terrains, post-nuclear test zones, and deep-sea environments. Working between artistic exploration and scientific inquiry, Charrière employs methods ranging from field expeditions to archival research. His practice encompasses photography, sculpture, installation, and time-based media, often in large-scale, immersive formats.
Internationally recognized, his work has been presented in leading museums, biennials, and art institutions, where it has been celebrated for bridging scientific rigor with speculative imagination. Charrière challenges how we represent landscapes: he refuses to see them as backdrops, instead insisting on their status as dynamic processes and cultural imaginaries. Through this lens, he questions legacies of exploration and extractivism, probing how human presence inscribes itself onto geological and ecological spaces.
A global practice of immersion
Charrière’s art is grounded in fieldwork: expeditions to fragile, symbolically charged, or politically contested environments yield both material traces and conceptual frameworks for his works. From these encounters, he generates installations that translate ecological realities into spaces of sensorial and intellectual engagement.
In “Midnight Zone”, Charrière’s global practice converges around the element of water. Here, water is simultaneously archive and solvent, mirror and signal. It binds human history to planetary time, circulating as glaciers, rivers, currents, and atmospheric vapor. The exhibition asks viewers to abandon the surface perspective that dominates our imagination of the sea, to instead descend into its depths, where light vanishes and orientation falters. This focus on submersion rather than representation aligns with the exhibition’s title: the “midnight zone” designates the bathypelagic region of the ocean, a space beyond sunlight where ecosystems exist in near-total darkness.
The works presented do not depict water, they allow it to “move” through elemental choreographies. Visitors are enveloped in light refracted and fractured, in the low-frequency vibrations of industrial noise, in the spectral glow of a lighthouse lantern, and in the infinite spirals of fossils transformed into commodities.
3. Julian Charrière, And Beneath It All Flows Liquid Fire, (Video Still), 2019, © 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich, Julian Charrière
Highlights of the exhibition
The exhibition culminates in a triad of works that crystallize Charrière’s investigation of water as both material and metaphor. In “And Beneath It All Flows Liquid Fire” (2019), a video installation, a fountain, an ancient symbol of civilization’s mastery over water, erupts not with clear jets but with flames. This fantastical inversion collapses the distinction between water and fire, suggesting that beneath the Earth’s surface a restless, molten vitality persists, indifferent to human politics or control.
The fountain evokes how water infrastructures have long defined power: irrigation networks, aqueducts, canals and dams have turned landscapes fertile or barren, secured empires, and reconfigured geopolitics. Yet in Charrière’s rendering, the fountain becomes excessive, absurd, wasteful, embodying both humanity’s and its inability to reconcile with the forces it seeks to master. The flames, at once destructive and generative, recall fire myths at the origins of civilization while projecting an image of elemental volatility.
From fire we sink to water’s most unfathomable depths in “Midnight Zone” (2025), the eponymous installation. A lighthouse Fresnel lens, historically a beacon of orientation and safety, is inverted and submerged into the Clarion–Clipperton Zone, more than a kilometer below the sea. Brought back and suspended in the museum space, the lens rotates, projecting beams of light across reflective foil walls and fine haze.
The light fractures, multiplying endlessly, an effect heightened by a soundscape of low-frequency noise derived from deep-sea industrial activity. The recordings, container ships, seismic blasts and sonar, are translated into vibrations that unsettle the space. Visitors find themselves disoriented, immersed in a fractured choreography of light and sound that mirrors the disturbances human industry has inflicted on marine ecosystems.
Finally, “Spiral Economy” (2025) shifts the focus to time, trade, and commodification. Here, a vending machine; icon of mechanized consumption contains not snacks but ammonite fossils, relics of ancient oceans. Their spiraling forms, multiplied through an infinity mirror, evoke geological deep time, an eternal rotation that dwarfs human cycles of consumption.
The coin slot, cast in the shape of a conch shell, recalls early forms of currency, linking past economies of exchange with present systems of commodification. The work reveals the ocean as a site of extraction and commerce: just as small-scale fishing was industrialized into trawling, today seabeds are mined for minerals and fossil fuels.
By embedding ammonites into the coils of a vending machine, Charrière reframes natural history as commodity, urging us to confront the illusion of limitless consumption and to recognize the fragility of oceanic ecologies spiraling toward an uncertain future.
Taken together, these works form a constellation where water, fire, and fossil converge. They articulate the contradictions of modernity: the desire to control elements, the industrial exploitation of ecosystems, and the persistence of planetary forces beyond human grasp.
“Midnight Zone” at Museum Tinguely situates Julian Charrière among the most significant contemporary artists addressing environmental thresholds through art. Rather than documenting ecological crises, his works open sensory and conceptual spaces where the contradictions of our time, creation and destruction, exploitation and reverence are brought into tension.
Informations about the exhibition
Place: Museum Tinguely
Date: 11.6.2025 – 2.11.2025
Curators: Tabea Panizzi and Andres Pardey
Ticket: Available on the website of the Museum Tinguely OR at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Museum Tinguely
Museum Tinguely
Paul Sacher-Anlage 2 - P.O Box 3255
CH-4002 Basel
Phone: +41 61 681 93 20
Mail: tinguelybasel.infos@roche.com