Julian Charrière
Iroojrilik, 2016

Single-channel video installation, color, sound by Edward Davenport
21 min 3 sec


Between 1946 and 1958, at a remote Pacific Atoll, 23 of the most powerful manmade explosions in history occurred. During this period, bombs delivering a combined fission yield of 42.2 megatons were detonated. The force of one of these, Castle Bravo, was enough to vaporize two islands and gouge a massive crater – measuring 800 metres in diameter – out of the primordial reef. Another threw a fleet of 70 captured and decommissioned WW2 battleships – some of them up to 250 metres long – up into the air. A few were ripped to shreds. Others, like the USS Saratoga and the HIJMS Nagato – storied flagships of the US and Japanese navies – eventually sank to the bottom, where their rusting hulks remain today. During this period, obliterated geology would become radioctive particles, carried on the wind to then fall on communities in neighbouring atolls. Meanwhile, the people of Bikini, who had been ‘asked’ to temporarily leave their home to make way for a series of experiments ventured ‘for the good of mankind and to end all wars’ began to learn the meaning of an exile and dispossession that continues until present. Today, the atoll’s islands bear architectural scars that stand as profane registers of this program and its unresolved consequences; a series of concrete bunkers, jutting out from the shore or hidden beneath jungle. 

Charrierè’s video work – entitled Iroojrilik – captures these structures’ decay, its manner of editing further suggesting morphological overlaps with the monstrous wrecks lying on the bottom of the Bikini Atoll lagoon, assailed by tide and time. Making no use of archival material – its original underwater images captured at depths far below standard dive profiles – is unquestionably the most unique, and comprehensive, perspective on the maritime ruins of Bikini ever put together. Yet, rather than explicating individual vessels or buildings, the cumulative impression given is that of an Atlantis or lost civilization – architectural features of one ship cut together with those of others, such that it appears as though a submerged mega-structure has been discovered. On a more general note, the film employs another series of elisions and substitutions. Through a series of montages, mixing sunsets and sunrises, it proposes an uncertain distinction between daybreak and nightfall – first light of a new day in Pacific history, and the waning of another: Visions of multiple suns and endless dawns stretch across the the horizon. Pictorial energies shift and sway, like palm trees and coral ferns growing on cannon mounts, between construction and destruction; transporting the viewer to a ‘non-place’, or the beginning of a brave new world. Like other works in the exhibition, Iroojrilik is a sensitive meditation on beauty, atrocity, and memory. – Excerpt from Nadim Samman's text on the exhibition "First Light"


*1987 in Morges, Switzerland | Living and working in Berlin, Germany
 

Julian Charrière is a French-Swiss artist based in Berlin whose work bridges the realms of environmental science and cultural history. Marshalling performance, sculpture and photography, his projects often stem from fieldwork in remote locations with acute geophysical identities – such as volcanoes, ice-fields and radioactive sites. To date, his works have explored post-romantic constructions of ‘nature’, and staged tensions between deep or geological timescales and those relating to mankind. Charrière’s approach further reflects upon the mythos of the quest and its objects in a globalised age. Deploying seemingly perennial imagery to contemporary ends, his interventions at the borderline of mysticism and the material encapsulate our fraught relations with place.

A former student of Olafur Eliasson and participant of the Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments), Charriére has exhibited his work – both individually and as a part of the Berlin-based art collective Das Numen – at museums and institutions worldwide, including at the Parasol Unit Foundation for Art in London; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne in Switzerland; Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin; Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna; Thyssen Bornemizsa Art Contemporary in Vienna; Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin; The Reykjavik Art Museum in Iceland; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo; The Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India; and at the the 12th Biennale de Lyon in France. In 2012, Charrière collaborated with the artist Julius von Bismarck on the site-specific performance piece Some Pigeons Are More Equal Than Others for the 13th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Charrière is be featured in the 57th International Art Exhibition, titled VIVA ARTE VIVA, curated by Christine Macel for La Biennale di Venezia.