Julian Charrière: Hard Core: MONA

2.4 billion years ago, more or less, there was no oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere. 2.4 billion years after that, underground at Mona, the French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière has been hard at work in the bedrock, bringing forth a new artwork.

David Walsh writes:

Ideas burst from Julian Charrière like licks from an over-friendly dog. Sometimes it’s a lot—attending one of Julian’s exhibitions can be overwhelming. But Julian isn’t a meddler. His ideas are deep and incisive, the sort of ideas that expose the soft white underbelly of reality.

Hard Core marks Julian Charrière's first solo exhibition in Australia and brings together a major body of work spanning sculpture, film, photography and installation.

Presented throughout MONA's subterranean galleries, the exhibition brings together works exploring geology, extraction, transformation and deep time. Drawing on years of field research in some of the world's most remote and environmentally charged landscapes, Charrière reveals forces and histories that exist far beyond human perception, yet continue to shape the world we inhabit.

Working across sculpture, film, photography and installation, the artist approaches the planet as both subject and material. Volcanoes, glaciers, mineral formations and industrial sites become points of departure for works that collapse distinctions between nature and culture, science and imagination.

As David Walsh notes, "Hard Core asks us to think beyond our own lifespan and consider our place within the immensity of geological time."

Co-curated by Olivier Varenne and Jarrod Rawlins, the exhibition offers a compelling encounter with one of the most distinctive artistic practices of his generation.