Forward of Artwork Basel, French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière opened a brand new exhibition on the Tinguely Museum that invitations the artwork world to take a deep dive into water—its therapeutic, regenerative and important vitality—as a solution to reestablish a reference to nature. On this magical, virtually mystical present, Charrière urges guests to step away from the capitalist, fast-paced, profit-driven mindset of the artwork truthful and artwork market system—even earlier than their summer season break—and as a substitute decelerate, attune physique and thoughts to the rhythms of the abyss, and rethink our place inside a fragile ecology.
Titled “Midnight Zone,” the exhibition revolves round Charrière’s newest video work—an immersive homage to the wealthy, typically invisible biodiversity of the deep sea, the place natural world thrive past human attain. It’s a realm largely inaccessible not solely to our our bodies and senses but additionally to our scientific probing, but one upon which a lot of life on Earth relies upon.
“Midnight Zone is the place to begin of an extended journey—a sort of abyssal dream machine that casts mild into the unknown,” Charrière advised Observer after the press walkthrough. The complete exhibition is an try to illuminate a attainable expedition into the delicate ecosystems that dwell in oceanic darkness.
The institutional area has been subtly—virtually ceremonially—reclaimed by water: by the ocean, by the ocean. Guests immerse themselves in a fluid, sensory world that merges the bodily and the unconscious, guiding us again to our primordial bond with water—the supply of all life, and the place to which all matter finally returns within the infinite circulation of particles. “We’re all a part of the world and the world is a part of us,” Charrière stated early within the press tour, grounding the present’s meditative rhythm. “Midnight Zone” casts a light-weight not simply on biodiversity,” he continued, “however on the constructions of notion and ambition that body our relationship to the unknown. It’s a descent into magnificence in addition to into the contradictions of exploration, extraction and ecological intimacy on a planetary scale.”
Many marine species talk by way of frequencies that fall outdoors the vary of human notion—a sensory inaccessibility that Charrière addresses straight within the present. “It’s a central theme, and it begins the second one enters the exhibition,” he explains. Guests step right into a darkened hall that at the beginning appears silent. However slowly, a faint crackling begins to emerge: a tender staccato of clicks and pops from the sound set up Choralography. Most received’t acknowledge the supply instantly, in response to the artist, however these are the dwelling acoustics of a thriving coral reef. “It’s an invite to reorient notion—to grasp that even areas we expect we all know are layered with indicators past the visible. This primary auditory encounter turns into a degree of departure: how will we relate to ecologies we can’t totally sense? What dimensions of data stay hidden after we privilege sight over different types of expertise?”
Because the partitions develop darker, a creeping sonic uncanniness begins to take maintain, revealing the dissonance between how sound travels by way of air and the way it strikes by way of water greater than 4 occasions quicker. This distinction just isn’t merely scientific however profoundly experiential, and Charrière recreates it by way of a gradual distortion. As we transfer deeper into the exhibition, the soundscape shifts subtly from a vibrant, biophonic symphony—alive with the rhythms of marine life—right into a thinner, extra brittle acoustic area. On this transition, the presence of anthropophony—the sonic imprint of human exercise—emerges slowly however unmistakably, overpowering the reef’s pure voices and exposing the fragility of those ecosystems beneath steady intrusion.
Curiously, the submarine journey Charrière phases begins with Mexican cenotes—pure sinkholes that, in Mayan cosmology, had been revered as sacred portals, thresholds between the human world and the underworld. Rising from the darkness of a room softly lit with dimly calibrated mild, a collection of pictures seems to drift in suspension, capturing the ascending and descending gestures of human our bodies caught between dimensions. In The place Waters Meet, freedivers traverse a chemocline, a cloudy boundary of sulfur-rich backside water, marking not solely a bodily transition but additionally an inward passage into altered notion and elemental reminiscence.
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On this unconscious liquid area, the physique depicted turns into one with the water, with the move, with its environment. “We’re all a part of the world and the world is a part of us,” the artist says. Coming into a cenote just isn’t merely a bodily act—it’s a portal, step one in a symbolic descent into the unconscious, aligning with what has been described because the “oceanic feeling,” a uncommon sensation of full oneness with nature. On this method, the ocean turns into not simply the backdrop for transcendence however its very embodiment—a realm the place the boundaries between self and world dissolve.
Following this initiation, the exhibition deepens—each sensorially and conceptually. Charrière begins to play with theatrical mild and sound, guiding us into the abyss by way of delicate cues. Right here, new frequencies reveal and check the outer edges of human notion, exposing the thresholds the place our senses start to falter. “A lot of this acoustic exercise lies outdoors human notion—both too low or too excessive, or occurring in circumstances we can’t bodily face up to,” Charrière explains, quoting science author Amorina Kingdon, who reminds us that “the ocean is a corridor of voices, most of them past our listening to.”
Within the pioneering video set up Silent World (Monde de Silence), Charrière delves deeper into the bounds of sensory notion beneath the ocean’s floor, the place sound drifts past the grasp of human ears. The piece facilities on a minimal but immersive gesture: a video projected into water, the place daylight and vapor converge in quiet choreography. What at first seems to be hearth burning underwater reveals itself as a reversed perspective—daylight captured from beneath the floor, rising upward as viewers gaze down into the basin.
Because the caption explains, the title references Jacques Cousteau’s groundbreaking movie Le Monde du Silence, one of many first to seize shifting pictures from the ocean depths. Although Cousteau’s earliest dives had been paradoxically financed by oil corporations looking for new extraction applied sciences, the footage inadvertently revealed the ocean’s magnificence and fragility. Charrière reactivates this contradiction, exhibiting how the very forces that endanger marine ecosystems have additionally made them seen, inviting reflection on our function in damaging the planet and the potential for preservation.
But Charrière additionally phases a collection of sensorial and sculptural interventions that return us to a extra bodily, extra visible encounter with these distant realms we will entry, however so typically commodify. In Spiral Financial system, a merchandising machine full of ammonites and fossils evokes the logic of a cupboard of curiosities, remodeling remnants of deep time into collectible commodities—a previous was product, historical past and pure tradition offered by the coin. Elsewhere, Silent World – Saratoga presents a photograph collection capturing the sunken kitchen of the U.S. Navy plane provider USS Saratoga, now resting on the backside of Bikini Atoll’s lagoon. Submerged and partially entombed by rising seas, the wreck exists in a state of suspended transformation—without delay historic artifact and dwelling ecosystem. Poised between spoil and renewal, it turns into a hybrid object the place reminiscence and biology converge, additional dissolving inherited dichotomies between nature and tradition. Because the captions recommend, Charrière invitations us to see the ocean not as an infinite useful resource, however as a fragile, imperiled reservoir of life poised between extraction and extinction, spiraling towards an unsure future.
Additional down within the exhibition, Calipso incorporates a Corbusier chaise longue paired with an oxygen system, evoking each the promise of life and survival underwater and the lurking presence of potential toxicity. The human—fragile, animal, unadapted—is portrayed right here as homo faber, reliant on instruments and applied sciences to persist, but already destabilized in its psychosomatic stability by the disconnection trendy society has created from its primordial bond with pure cycles and energies. And nonetheless, on this suspended state, sustained by machines, we’re compelled into introspection and confronted by the void and the bounds of our bodily and bodily capacities, although maybe not these of the spirit and creativeness.
On this sense, all the exhibition poetically hacks into the intricate net of life that binds people to 1000’s of different species. At a second when capitalism is in disaster, and with it, the collapse of an anthropocentric worldview, artists have emerged as important voices in reimagining interspecies relations. “These, for me, are about shifting notion and discovering methods to attune to life-worlds that exist far past what human senses can normally entry,” Charrière says.
In Albedo, the artist invitations viewers to maneuver by way of the ocean like a cetacean, navigating by strain and vibration reasonably than sight, because the submerged world is projected onto the museum’s ceiling. “It was a solution to step out of our recurring body,” he explains. Shot within the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean, the video flips our perspective on the imaginaries which have lengthy formed our understanding of each the deep sea and deep area. One of the crucial disorienting but immersive works within the exhibition invitations viewers to lie the wrong way up, gazing on the water of melting glaciers and icebergs the artist filmed in Iceland. This inverted perspective turns into a portal into the unconscious, a destabilizing descent into the everlasting flux of all matter. Albedo destabilizes our sense of orientation by inverting the viewer’s gaze and invitations a reexamination of the pure cycles that lie above, under and inside our understanding.
In one other work formed by three years of analysis, Charrière follows water in its many varieties—ice, vapor, liquid—whereas exposing the hole in tempo between human and ecological time. Throughout completely different landscapes and occasions, with Pitch Drop, Charrière follows ever-changing states of water: with a complete of 1,000 particular person drops, this piece is designed to span a symbolic 10,000-year timeframe, a temporal scale that reaches past the horizon of human historical past. Continuity turns into the construction, echoing how reminiscence itself is inbuilt unbroken, nonlinear flux.
This similar elemental fluidity underpins Charrière’s lengthy alchemical experiment to supply diamonds, not from the Earth, however from the sky. As he explains in the course of the walkthrough, he extracted carbon dioxide from the ambiance over the course of three years, materializing it into artificial diamonds that glisten like condensed sky. In footage filmed in Icelandic waters beneath an intense blue mild, he swims, or maybe glides, over underwater ice, the place trapped particles of water, air and sky shimmer with quiet urgency. These fragile constellations trace on the world that may very well be, however which we’re steadily eroding. The artist calls this course of sky mining—a poetic dematerialization of carbon into crystalline matter, without delay speculative and significant.
In distinction, Coalface, a sculptural work constituted of polished anthracite coal, grounds this cosmic attain within the sediment of historical past. Its curved floor, harking back to a funhouse mirror, affords a warped reflection of the viewer, distorted by the very materials that powered the economic age. Dimly illuminated by a flickering oil lamp, the work confronts us with our emotional detachment from nature, inviting us to reckon with the extractive techniques we proceed to inhabit. Coalface doesn’t simply recall the previous but additionally implicates us in its ongoing combustion.
Threaded by way of these works is Charrière’s curiosity in how we assemble that means by way of pictures—particularly pictures of the previous. “The best way we use pictures from the previous is how we address our presence,” he clarifies. Whether or not reflecting on ice melting in 2013, diamonds shaped from the ambiance or coal carved into mirrors, his observe is a quiet name to reframe our place inside the planetary archive, not as distant observers however as accountable individuals.
The central work, Midnight Zone, continues this search however proposes one other sort of attunement: each the set up and the movie ask what it means to method subjectivities we will’t totally perceive. Right here, the intermittent mild of a lantern acts as a central energetic nucleus—a sort of glowing mind—changing into a key level of orientation. Like an underwater bonfire, it attracts each marine life and guests into its orbit, making a web site of encounter, a platform for a ritual of reconnection. And but, as Charrière notes, it additionally intrudes, piercing the darkness with synthetic mild. “It questions how we enter these areas, and what our presence modifications.”
“The deep ocean is commonly imagined as silent, however that’s a floor phantasm,” he says. “Under, there’s fixed sound: the groaning of tectonic plates, the snap of shrimp claws, the whirring of cephalopods and the blunt intrusions of sonar and air weapons.” The ocean is an echo chamber of the ever-changing and too quickly altering balances in our biosphere.
In Black Smoker, for example, the artist brings us a fraction of the huge unknown within the ocean’s darkest zones, the place mild by no means penetrates and life persists beneath excessive circumstances of strain and warmth. On this immersive sound set up, Charrière makes these inaccessible depths perceptible by way of a composition of area recordings gathered with hydrophones, alongside seismic monitoring knowledge and archival scientific materials. The work captures the uncooked sonic textures of the deep sea, from the crackling launch of subterranean gases to the thunderous eruptions of stone and magma from underwater calderas. A multi-channel sound system transports listeners to distant underwater landscapes such because the abyssal plains off Oahu, the Monterey Submarine Canyons, the hydrothermal vents close to Panarea and the Axial Seamount off Oregon’s coast. Layered into this acoustic atmosphere is a spectral “choir” of historical voices, evoking the enduring rhythms and vibrations which have pulsed by way of these submerged worlds for millennia—soundscapes that stay largely unheard, but type the planet’s most elemental refrain.
All through the present, the sensorial inaccessibility of a broader vary of pure phenomena just isn’t revealed by way of direct translation however by way of the cautious building of an environment that evokes the bounds of our personal notion whereas gesturing towards ritualistic, other ways of increasing it. By tapping into different perceptive and non secular realms, Charrière invitations a distinct sort of attunement. “It’s not a naturalistic soundscape however a sort of speculative ecology: an area the place vibration, strain and resonance displace narrative,” he explains. “It’s a place the place the physique listens earlier than the thoughts comprehends.”
On this exhibition, the artist engages with the fabric, political and non secular dimensions of water. Describing it as “the primary pores and skin of the Earth,” the works on view reveal water’s twin nature—each sacred and mundane, life-sustaining and more and more beneath menace. However Charrière’s creative observe has lengthy centered on creating fractures inside the dominant frameworks of narrative and notion—trendy techniques that favor distance, readability and classification as the first methods of apprehending the world. “Sound, particularly when untethered from its sources, affords one other encounter mode. One which’s intimate, disorienting and porous,” he notes.
Right here, sound turns into a device to impress a bodily shift in perspective past the bounds of bizarre human sensory expertise. “All through the present, there are shifts in perspective that attempt to undo the standard distance between us and the opposite species we have an effect on,” Charrière says. “Within the soundscape, for instance, the overwhelming presence of human-made noise reminds us that our intrusion is already inscribed into the ocean’s material.” We’re by no means outdoors these techniques, he reminds us—we form them, typically unconsciously.
“There’s a politics to listening,” he provides. “Ecosystems with no voice are simpler to disregard. However as soon as we start to tune in, these environments acquire presence. They change into not simply summary areas of knowledge or useful resource potential, however locations with texture, language and company.” Marine ecosystems, he says, are already talking—not essentially to us, however even in speaking amongst themselves, they assert their existence. “The query is whether or not we’re prepared to enter that dialog, figuring out we could by no means totally perceive its phrases,” Charrière pointedly notes.
Charrière’s seductive aesthetic of fantastically composed pictures, sculptural repetition and theatrical lighting immerses viewers in transporting sensations whereas frightening vital thought of ecological resilience, complicity and planetary futures. As he explains, the aural turns into a method of undoing the visible’s grip, as if the sonic dimension had been already an area of suspension, dislodging the bizarre sensory orientation that retains us grounded in a human-centric mode of notion that usually makes it simpler to disregard the broader spectrum of life, past and inside us.
Finally, Charrière makes use of up to date media to stage a sort of perceptual hack—an experiential train the place ritual, mythopoesis, know-how and time converge right into a holistic encounter, reawakening the senses and gently guiding us to acknowledge the dense net of interdependencies through which we’re already entangled.
Midnight Zone was conceived for the twin and eponymous exhibition at Museum Tinguely and developed in shut collaboration with Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg—an exhibition years within the making, delayed by the pandemic—however the work had its first public presentation not in a museum, however on the seaside in Baja California, going through the Pacific Ocean. Oriented westward towards the Clarion–Clipperton Fracture Zone, this premiere was later adopted by a presentation on the Museo de Historia Pure y Cultural Ambiental.
Though Midnight Zone was not made particularly for Mexico, its debut there acknowledged the nation’s deep relevance, as Charrière confirms—a geographic and ecological proximity linked to probably the most contested environmental frontiers of our time. “This premiere on Mexican soil was by no means about site-specificity in a slender sense. It was about orientation,” he explains. “Standing on the fringe of that shoreline, the work opened a perceptual hall towards an space few will ever see: an enormous, mineral-rich abyss at present being surveyed and parcelled for future exploitation.” In that context, the work resonated with the urgency of its environment. “The ocean there was not an abstraction however a presence, respiration in opposition to the coast. The menace felt tangible.” Set in opposition to a backdrop the place the immensity of nature compels each confrontation and give up, the dialog round sovereignty, extraction and ecological uncertainty was already underway. Midnight Zone “entered that discourse as a sort of lens: not providing solutions, however opening an area for encounter.”
Now offered in Basel at Museum Tinguely, the exhibition additionally coincides with the centenary of Jean Tinguely’s beginning—a pioneering determine who pushed the boundaries of artwork past the permanence of type, a pursuit echoed in Charrière’s personal multimedia observe. When requested whether or not he sees any affinities between his work and the Swiss artist’s legacy, Charrière stated he resonated with Tinguely’s deep understanding of entropy—his machines by no means striving for perfection or permanence. “They exist in a state of movement, breakdown and fragility,” he observes. “Whereas my very own work doesn’t use mechanics in the identical method, I share that curiosity in unstable techniques—whether or not environmental, technological or perceptual. I’m drawn to gestures that reveal how issues perform and, simply as typically, how they fail.”
On the similar time, because the artist notes, there’s additionally a shared dedication to sensory complexity. “Tinguely’s machines clatter and pulse in area, producing a sort of embodied noise,” Charrière displays, noting how his personal installations equally function by way of sound, vibration, temperature or spatial disorientation—methods that goal to immerse the viewer and shift their sense of orientation. “It’s not nearly representing an concept, however letting it resonate by way of the physique. In that method, I believe we each interact with materiality as one thing that operates throughout registers—visible, sonic, haptic—and that continues to be in flux reasonably than mounted.”
Exhibiting Midnight Zone at Museum Tinguely in the course of the centenary of Jean Tinguely’s beginning appears like a significant coincidence, Charrière considers. “His legacy opens an area for occupied with artworks not as static objects, however as experiences unfolding over time—fragile, performative and entangled with their environment.”
Because the museum sits on the banks of the Rhine, in a landlocked nation, the coordinates shift from Baja California’s ecosystems, however the entanglement stays right here on the identical river the place, every year, many from the worldwide artwork world collect to swim and float. “The Rhine flows previous the museum, formed by centuries of human trade, contamination and hydrological management. Its waters carry sediment, reminiscence and consequence,” Charrière displays. “We’re not on the fringe of the abyss, however we stay downstream from its results.”
What shifts right here just isn’t the that means of the work, however the framework by way of which it’s offered, perceived and contextualized. “From the Pacific trench to the Alpine riverbed, these usually are not separate realities. They’re factors inside a single, circulating system,” the artist explains, emphasizing how the work finally turns into a name to acknowledge continuity—to grasp the deep sea not as distant, however as embedded inside the techniques we inhabit. “Whether or not proven in Mexico, in Basel or past, its message stays: there is no such thing as a elsewhere. There’s solely the delicate, flowing current all of us inhabit.”
Midnight Zone asks us to dissolve the phantasm of distance—to see that what occurs distant is already arriving, whether or not by present, local weather or collapse. Charrière’s work revives a extra soulful connection between human existence and its atmosphere, inviting a shift in how we relate to the techniques we already inhabit. “I consider probably the most important roles of artwork at the moment is to recalibrate our methods of sensing—to supply new alignments between notion and the world round us,” he says towards the tip of our dialogue. “A lot of what shapes our actuality now operates at scales that escape direct comprehension: planetary techniques, deep time, geological change, the circulation of ocean currents or atmospheric shifts. These items are actual, but troublesome to totally grasp. Artwork attracts us nearer to them not by explaining, however by permitting us to really feel their presence.”
For Charrière, artwork serves as a tuning system—a kaleidoscope by way of which we would attune ourselves anew to the dwelling world and the advanced, typically invisible techniques we inhabit. “Artwork can open area for proximity—proximity to the non-human, the basic, the long-durational,” he displays. “That sort of intimacy with the unfamiliar or the huge can result in a distinct sort of understanding, one rooted in resonance reasonably than motive. I see artwork as a medium of encounter. Not simply with nature, however with forces higher than ourselves—attraction techniques, geophysical rhythms or temporalities that transfer past the human lifespan. These usually are not issues we will management, and even all the time describe, however we will sense their pull.”
In Midnight Zone, Charrière creates an area the place that pull could be acknowledged—the place it may be felt. Relatively than striving to decode or resolve the world, he proposes a distinct method: to stick with its complexity, to dwell in it. “To permit surprise, slowness and care to re-enter our area of expertise,” he suggests. And maybe, he hints, it’s exactly that shift in expertise—quiet, perceptual and deeply embodied—that makes different types of transformation attainable.
Julian Charrière’s “Midnight Zone” is on view at Museum Tinguely by way of November 2, 2025.
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