As part of the GASAG Art Prize 2018, Julian Charrière will be showing a multimedia installation at the Berlinische Galerie that will take the audience under the surface of the Pacific Ocean.
Seventy years after the first US nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll, the artist has embarked on an expedition to a geographical area that has been rendered permanently uninhabitable by the environmental damage caused to humans. "As We Used to Float" shows the legacy of the bomb tests above as well as below sea level and makes them physically experienceable as a spatial experience. As unintentional monuments they stand for the tension between man-made and natural transformation processes. For Julian Charrière, they also mark the point in time at which man has become one of the most important influencing factors for the biological, geological and atmospheric processes on earth.
Julian Charrière was born in 1987 in Morges in the French part of Switzerland. In 2006 he began studying art in Switzerland and in 2007 moved to the Berlin University of the Arts, where he graduated in 2013 from Olafur Eliasson at the Institute for Space Experiments. His work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions, including 2017 in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale. The exhibition in the Berlinische Galerie is his first institutional solo exhibition in Berlin.