Selected Press:
Art Guide Australia
Julian Charrière and the Land Before Time
By Briony Downes, August 14, 2026
Hube
Julian Charrière descends into deep time with 'Hard Core' at Mona, Hobart
By Editors, June 20, 2026
The Guardian
I just inhaled 2.4bn year old oxygen in Tasmania. Now I’m part of an exhibition until I die
By Sarah Aitken, June 5, 2026
To learn more about Julian Charrière: Hard Core, please visit mona.net.au.
Julian Charrière’s inaugural solo exhibition in Australia, Hard Core, at the Museum of Old and New Art, is on view from June 6, 2026, to March 29, 2027. Featuring sculpture, photography, video, and installation, Hard Core investigate deep time, geological transformation, and humanity’s complex relationship with the natural world.
At the center of Hard Core are sculptures formed from organic and industrial materials including coal, lava, onyx, obsidian, and technological waste. Glacial stones extracted and cored for scientific research are meticulously restored in his sculpture Not All Who Wander Are Lost, 2019, creating a compelling intersection between natural history, scientific inquiry, and human intervention.
For his kinetic work Atlas, 2025, a fragment of stromatolite is shaped into a perfect sphere, compressing vast geological time in an ongoing process of refinement. Throughout the exhibition, cycles of preservation, transformation, decay, and extraction emerge as recurring themes. Sculptures with plants suspended by cryogenic preservation, snails slowly consuming the calcium carbonate of marble sculptures, and a vending machine stocked with fossilized ammonites, recontextualizing primordial relics as objects of contemporary exchange and consumption.
Through photography and video installations, Charrière highlights the tensions between technological advancements and their environmental consequences. In the video work Pure Waste, 2021, extracted carbon dioxide molecules are turned into diamonds, which are returned to the glacial waters of Northern Greenland extracted from people’s breath.
While in Controlled Burn, 2022, drones traverse through fireworks erupting above decommissioned oil platforms, open-pit coal mines, and other abandoned sites of extraction, creating haunting spectacles that blur the boundaries between destruction and celebration.
Breathe, a permanent installation commissioned specifically for the museum is integrated into the architecture of the foundation. The immersive work releases oxygen molecules trapped within ancient iron ore formations dating back 2.4 billion years, a pivotal moment in Earth's history when oxygen first began accumulating in the atmosphere. Viewers are invited to inhale this primordial air, breathing molecules that have remained sealed within rock for billions of years. By rendering tangible, processes that fundamentally shaped the conditions for life on Earth, Breathe creates a profound encounter with planetary history, connecting the temporal human body to the immense scale of geological time.