Julian Charrière
Controlled Burn, 2022
4K film, 16:10 aspect ratio, 3D ambisonic soundscape, continuous video loop, 32 minutes.

Art Basel, Parcours, Kunstmuseum Basel Parcours
Public Dates: June 12 – 18, 2023
Parcours Night: Saturday, June 17, 6 - 11pm

Amid today’s entwined climate and energy crises, Julian Charrière’s film Controlled Burn, 2022 interrogates the dark vitality of materials used for fuel: coal, petroleum, palm oil, and solar energy. Filmed with drones, this work invites viewers to soar through an aerial landscape of imploding fireworks, a spectacular temporal voyage journeying through unfurling ferns and fluttering moths to rusting cooling towers, decommissioned oil rigs, and open pit mines. Spanning a vast cavern of deep time, Controlled Burn, arrives in the present as a dazzling celebration of biological adaption. Looking back in time, underground, and into future atmospheres and oceans saturated by the burnt residues of modernity’s excesses, Charrière’s speculative vision addresses the fossilized lives of past geological ages, the agency of plants in shaping planetary futures, and humankind’s fraught relationship to fire.

For additional information on Julian Charrière, please click here.

For all inquiries, please contact the gallery at info@skny.com.