Julian Charrière

Controlled Burn

04/09/2022 - 06/08/2023

ABOUT

Julian Charrière’s solo exhibition Controlled Burn will occupy the entirety of the Tadao Ando–designed Langen Foundation in Neuss, Germany, from 4 September 2022 to 6 August 2023. Featuring a suite of significant new commissions set within a constellation of works from Charrière’s oeuvre, Controlled Burn is the artist’s most extensive exhibition to date.
 
Controlled Burn meditates upon the flame as a figure of excess, containment, and renewal for our warming planet. Curated by Charrière’s long-time collaborators, philosopher Dehlia Hannah and art historian and curator Nadim Samman, the exhibition presents an ambitious essay on the politics and poetics of combustion. A site-specific installation enables the show to run on solar energy, engaging with the location’s prior use as a NATO rocket storage facility and the current climate and energy crises. 
 
Charrière’s work addresses urgent ecological concerns, often stemming from fieldwork at signal locations, such as volcanoes, glaciers, oil palm plantations, and undersea and radioactive zones. Deepening Charrière’s reflections upon ideas of nature and our place within it, Controlled Burn interrogates the dark vitality of materials used for fuel: coal, petroleum, palm oil, and sunshine. Taking us back in time and deep underground, Charrière’s speculative visions range over fossilized life-worlds and future atmospheres saturated by the burnt residues of modernity’s excess. Throughout, Controlled Burn questions humankind’s fraught grip on fire, while foregrounding the agency of plants in shaping planetary futures.