The fascinations of the Arctic and Antarctic have captured our collective imagination for centuries. For the last decade, French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière has traveled to remote and hostile polar regions to explore humankind’s interconnection with these otherworldly environments that have come to represent the precariousness of our future.
The artist’s first solo exhibition on the West Coast, Julian Charrière: Erratic presents works across media that revolve around the artist’s poetic engagement with ice landscapes challenging our constructs of different temporalities, while bringing attention to the traces and longstanding effects of human interferences in nature. The central work of this cinematic and sensory filled exhibition is Towards No Earthly Pole (2019), a panoramic film combining haunting footage of glaciers taken at night during the artist’s expeditions to various glacial regions.
Through immersive encounters with Charrière’s work in this timely exhibition, visitors are invited to approach an environmentally, culturally and politically charged geography with a heightened sense of ecological awareness.
Image: Julian Charrière, Towards No Earthly Pole, (installation view, MASI Lugano); Julian Charrière/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany; photo: Jens Ziehe
Julian Charrière: Erratic is supported by Etant donnés Contemporary Art, a program from Villa Albertine and FACE Foundation, in partnership with the French Embassy in the United States, with support from the French Ministry of Culture, Institut français, Ford Foundation, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, CHANEL, and ADAGP.