Julian Charrière: Hard Core: MONA

Hard Core is Julian Charrière's first solo exhibition in Australia and his first major project in Oceania. Conceived in close dialogue with Mona's architecture and landscape, the exhibition unfolds across the museum's galleries, the Void and newly excavated subterranean spaces, tracing a journey through geological, climatic and planetary time.

Bringing together sculpture, installation, film and photography, Hard Core explores the forces that shape our world beyond the scale of human experience. Stone, ice, coal, lava, metals and fossil matter become both material and subject, as Charrière examines the entangled histories of nature, extraction, industry and myth.

Throughout the exhibition, the artist confronts the fragility of planetary systems and the deep timescales that underpin them. Glacial boulders are cored and repaired with precious metals; ancient rock formations are transformed through slow mechanical processes; landscapes marked by resource extraction reappear in film and photography as sites of both destruction and wonder.

As Charrière notes, Hard Core brings together distinct works as a single geological body, compressing planetary durations into a shared encounter. Presented in Tasmania—a place whose landscapes evoke some of the oldest chapters of Earth's history—the exhibition situates contemporary human activity within a far older story of stone, ice and transformation.