Museum Tinguely
Paul Sacher-Anlage 1
4058 Basel
Schweiz
Julian Charrière: Midnight Zone
A core concern of French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière is how human beings inhabit the world and how the world, in turn, inhabits us. The comprehensive solo exhibition at Museum Tinguely presents photographs, sculptures, installations and new video works that deal with our relationship to Earth as a world of water—a liquidity that covers most of our planet with seas, lakes and ice, both habitat for a myriad of organisms and host to circulatory systems critical for the stability of our climate.
Unfolding over three floors, the exhibition Midnight Zone engages with underwater ecologies, from the influential local presence of the Rhine to distant oceans, exploring the complexity of water as an elemental medium affected by anthropogenic degradation. Reflecting upon its flow and materiality, profundity and politics, its mundane and sacral dimensions, the solo show acts as a kaleidoscope, inviting us to dive deep.
«Water is not a landscape — it is the condition of all life, the first skin of the Earth, the medium of our becoming.» Julian Charrière
In Midnight Zone, Julian Charrière invites visitors to think and feel with water: as atmosphere, memory, movement and kin. Drifting between deep-sea descent and cryospheric suspension, the exhibition unfolds as an immersive reflection on fluid worlds—not the sea as surface, but as substance, where boundaries dissolve. The artist considers this not only as a space to be entered, but as a world we can sink into and move within—becoming porous to its pressures, its depths, its dreams.
The exhibition brings together a series of elemental investigations—earlier works alongside major new commissions that trace Charrière’s long-standing exploration of environmental thresholds. Unfolding over three floors, the exhibition’s focus is on water not as a motif, but as a medium: the material through which histories sediment, crises unfold, and forms change state. The title refers to the bathypelagic zone of the ocean, where sunlight vanishes and vision fades.
