JULIAN CHARRIÈRE

Unfolding over three floors, the exhibition Midnight Zone engages with underwater ecologies, from the influential local presence of the Rhine to distant oceans, exploring the complexity of water as an elemental medium affected by anthropogenic degradation. Reflecting upon its flow and materiality, profundity and politics, its mundane and sacral dimensions, the solo show acts as a kaleidoscope, inviting us to dive deep.

In_Midnight Zone_, Julian Charrière invites visitors to think and feel with water: as atmosphere, memory, movement and kin. Drifting between deep-sea descent and cryospheric suspension, the exhibition unfolds as an immersive reflection on fluid worlds—not the sea as surface, but as substance, where boundaries dissolve. The artist considers this not only as a space to be entered, but as a world we can sink into and move within—becoming porous to its pressures, its depths, its dreams.

The exhibition brings together a series of elemental investigations—earlier works alongside major new commissions that trace Charrière’s long-standing exploration of environmental thresholds. Unfolding over three floors, the exhibition’s focus is on water not as a motif, but as a medium: the material through which histories sediment, crises unfold, and forms change state. The title refers to the bathypelagic zone of the ocean, where sunlight vanishes and vision fades.

In _Albedo _(2025), filmed beneath the arctic ocean between icebergs, the gaze shifts again. This time, the viewer follows water as it slips between solid, liquid, and vapor—a choreography of phase change unfolds in real time. Rather than rendering melting as catastrophe, the film resists the sublime, offering a study in flux, in atmospheres and absences. It reveals the sea as a kind of thought: unbounded, destabilizing and impossible to contain. The camera floats, reframes, releases. There are no fixed perspectives—only drift, suspension, dispersal.