AARAU.- The Aargauer Kunsthaus is presenting the work of the young Swiss artist Julian Charrière (b. 1987). Like the early explorers, the artist is drawn to the most inhospitable regions of the world, such as the North Pole or a nuclear weapons test site. In his latest film projection he takes the audience along on his artistic expeditions into the most impressive icy landscapes on the planet. The film is echoed in selected photographs and sculptures.
The exhibition Towards No Earthly Pole by Julian Charrière invites the viewer on a unique journey through the galleries in the museum. His latest film installation, Towards No Earthly Pole (2019) shows shimmering icebergs, gaping cracks in glaciers and surging polar seas. They appear abruptly out of the darkness before immediately being swallowed up by it again. In his film Charrière brings together various icy landscapes from our planet into a sensual and poetic cosmos. The space-filling, feature film-length projection allows the audience to immerse itself in this fascinating, deserted region. The exhibition setting intensifies the meditative effect of the scenery: the room is plunged in darkness and the vibrant sound backdrop underlines the atmosphere of the film.
As a visual artist, Julian Charrière is as much an explorer and a traveller as he is a scientist and an archaeologist. He effortlessly connects disparate art forms and different disciplines, as in the mysteriously concealed work The Purchase of the South Pole (2017). Hidden beneath the fabric normally used as a protective measure against the melting of the glaciers there is a cannon. Charrière is referring to Jules Verne’s adventure novel The Purchase of the North Pole (1889), in which the North Pole is put up for auction. The earth’s axis is to be straightened with a powerful shot from a cannon, in order to melt the polar ice cap and expose the treasures underneath. Lying on the ground around the cannon are leadencased coconuts – ‘souvenirs’ from Charrière’s expedition to the islands of the Bikini Atoll, which have been radio-actively contaminated for decades.
The stone sculptures Not All Who Wander Are Lost (2019) are distributed widely around the exhibition space and the inner courtyard of the Kunsthaus. They are erratic stones that have over the millennia been transported by glaciers far from their origins, and in which the artist has drilled numerous holes. The drill cores produced during soil analysis refer to the extraction and consumption of natural resources (some of the cores consist of partly of precious metals such as aluminium, copper, gold or silver). the sculptures Metamorphism (2016) the artist takes this process one step further and creates a rock himself, not unlike a contemporary alchemist. The formations displayed in vitrines were made from artificial lava and melted discarded computer parts.
The entire exhibition is informed by the contrast between the elements ice and fire. Tropisme (2014) consists of flash-frozen prehistoric plants, the photographs The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories (2013) show the artist melting a glacier in Iceland. The element of fire reappears in the burning fountain in the video And Beneath It All Flows Liquid Fire (2019) and in Thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows (2020) sculpted from large chunks of obsidian. Charrière uses the two contrasting elements to visualise change and transformation.
Julian Charrière’s curiosity and his interest in understanding the environment lead him into areas that have become global hot spots. For the visitors, the tour of the exhibition becomes a journey through Julian Charrière’s artistic cosmos, and at the same time offers an engagement with the effects of human activity on nature.
The exhibition, initiated by the former Director of the Aargauer Kunsthaus Madeleine Schuppli, is organised in collaboration with MASI (Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana), Lugano, where Towards No Earthly Pole was shown from 27 October 2019 until 15 March 2020. In 2021 Towards No Earthly Pole will be shown at the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas.
