Franco-Swiss artist Julian Charrière presents Erratic at SFMOMA, his first solo exhibition on the West Coast of the United States.
He has been exploring the Arctic and Antarctica for more than 10 years and, in the form of an immersive exhibition that leaves no one indifferent, he gives us his thoughts on “the interconnection of humanity with these environments of another world that have come to represent the precariousness of our future”.
Erratic consists of four installations around the artist’s poetic engagement with landscapes of ice drawing attention to the long-standing traces and effects of human interference in nature.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost, these sculpted erratic blocks evoke time and different velocities.
The main work is a panoramic film Towards No Earthy Pole combining spellbinding images of glaciers taken at night during the artist’s expeditions in various glacial regions. Embellished with an eclectic soundtrack, the experience is totally immersive and plunges the viewer into the heart of a polar region and its reimagined ice cliffs.
Don’t miss the very first photo at the entrance of the exhibition The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories III. It documents an intervention by the artist in Iceland in 2013 where he strives to melt the iceberg with a gas lamp: a derisory gesture to denounce the effects of global warming. It is also like an attempt to access different temporalities buried in the multiple glacial layers.
This immersive journey ends with the installation Pure Waste, presented on a small suspended video screen, where in a poetic gesture Julian Charrière throws diamonds into a glacial mill to bring them back to their origins – the polar ice caps – in order to complete the cycles chemicals disturbed by man!
Julian Charrière fabricated these diamonds from CO2 taken from Greenland which he then added to the breath of thousands of people who were delivered to him in balloons!!
To learn more about Julian Charrière’s creative process, here is a short interview via Art Basel:
Dates : August 6, 2022 to May 14 2023
Address : SF MOMA – 151 3rd street , San Francisco
Get tickets, click here
This exhibition is supported by Villa Albertine & FACE Foundation
