Julian Charrière: Deep End, the French-Swiss artist’s first solo museum show in Los Angeles. One of two inaugural Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize exhibitions presented at MOCA Grand Avenue this fall, Julian Charrière: Deep End is on view from November 15, 2026, through June 6, 2027. The exhibition reflects the Prize’s commitment to artists working at the intersections of art, climate, and environmental justice.
The works on view in Deep End explore the fragility and resilience of planetary water systems, engaging with the complexity of the sea not only as a regenerative carbon sink, habitat, chemical marker for climate change or liminal space, but also as a vast biogeological system in which we are entrenched. The exhibition marks the US premiere for Midnight Zone, 2024/2025, Charrière’s film and installation that plunges viewers downward into the waters of the Pacific Ocean directly above the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture, an area between Hawaii and Mexico whose seabed is rich in polymetallic nodules that have become a target for deep-sea mining.
From early works in photography and sculpture to films and newly commissioned immersive installations, Deep End demonstrates Charrière’s more than a decade-long engagement with the aesthetic and political dimensions of the natural world, considering how geological time, human history and reparative futures interrelate. Charrière has worked across the globe, engaging with sites where natural forces and human actions converge, foregrounding the realities of rapid industrialisation, extraction and pollution, along with other urgent issues at the forefront of conversations surrounding climate resilience today.
“If an artwork can, even momentarily, alter our relationship to a landscape, be it an ocean zone, or a glacier, or a reef, then it can perhaps also reshape how we understand our place alongside and within that environ, and the responsibilities and implications that come with it.”
- Julian Charrière
Presented therein are immersive environments and atmospheric conditions that evoke the ocean’s abyss, including a darkened exhibition space where multi-sensory experiences create a porous relationship between the viewer and object. Dreamlike compositions of moving image and sound bring audiences on a visceral journey into some of the planet’s most vulnerable and remote ecosystems, encouraging careful listening to the constant communication between the organisms that occupy it.
Materials such as bitumen, ground coral, and mud from the deep seafloor are embedded in several works, becoming charged with human history and our impulse to transform the natural world into a resource. They mark an intersection between the accelerating consequences of anthropogenic environmental change and the slow geological time required to produce the carbon deposits that fuel it.
The central component of the show is the new commission Hope Line, 2026, which features a live stream of a coral reef near Port Antonio, Jamaica, strongly affected by the 2023 El Niño bleaching event. This meditative installation allows visitors not only to witness and listen to one of the most important and biodiverse habitat types on the planet, but also to emit their own voices into it. Bridging time and place, Hope Line ultimately asks how art can act as a vector for advocacy, marking an extension to Charrière’s Calls for Action, 2024-ongoing series, which, created in collaboration with Art into Acres and Re:Wild, invites museum audiences to commune with terrestrial rainforests around the world.
The exhibition also facilitates the beginning of a feasibility study for a new but closely related project titled Reefwards – an enterprise which combines underwater land art with coral reef restoration and conservation, developed through past and present collaboration with scientists, researchers, NGOs and advising universities, and most recently in close dialogue with marine biologist and coral specialist Dr. Sebastian Schmidt-Roach and parametric designer and architect Phillipp Mecke.
