Julian Charrière: Controlled Burn

With a series of significant new commissions embedded in a constellation of works from Julian Charrière‘s oeuvre, “Controlled Burn” is the artist’s largest solo exhibition to date.

“Controlled Burn” meditates on the flame as a figure of excess, containment and renewal for our warming planet. The exhibition presents an ambitious essay on the politics and poetics of combustion, and the tensions between the myth and infrastructure of fire form its central axis. A site-specific installation allows the exhibition to run on solar power, in relation to the former use of the site as a NATO missile depot and the current climate and energy crises.

Charrière‘s work deals with urgent ecological problems, often resulting from fieldwork in marked locations, such as volcanoes, glaciers, oil palm plantations, underwater and radioactive areas. Deepening Charrière‘s reflections on ideas of nature and our place within it, Controlled Burn interrogates the dark vitality of materials used as fuels: coal, oil, palm oil and sunlight. Taking us back in time and deep underground, artist’s speculative visions span fossilised life-worlds and future atmospheres saturated with the burnt residue of modernity’s excess. Controlled Burn questions the human influence on fire, while emphasising the ability of plants to shape the future of the planet.