Julian Charrière, with his minimalist artwork A Thousand Worlds, presents a small single mirror floating on the wall. Made using a classical mirroring technique where a layer of silver is deposited on the back surface of the glass, it forms a highly reflective patina. Not immediately evident to the viewer, the silver used for this artwork has been extracted from thousands of black-and-white photographs, which accumulated the metal in the paper during their production process. This photographic method, known as the gelatin silver process, relies on silver halide crystals in a gelatin emulsion reacting to light, forming latent images. Through a laborious process of extraction and transformation, Charrière reclaims this silver, revealing a hidden economy of image-making, and by extension, a reflection on anthropogenic resource exploitation—a system where vast amounts of mineral, metal, and organic material are continually extracted, destroyed, and remade to serve human needs. 

Yet A Thousand Worlds, is also an intimate meditation on the relationship between the self and the act of image production. Drawing on psychology, the mirror emerges not only as a reflective surface but as a symbolic space where identity is mined, questioned, and reframed. Assembled from the dissolved remnants of countless photographs, the work becomes a collective mirror—a liquid space where individual memories and captured moments, once entangled and singular, are melted down and reconstituted into a unified, ambiguous reflection. It offers an eternal return in which personal histories are both obliterated and preserved, reappearing as something other— a sea of something shared.

- text from Beitin, Andreas and Roland Wetzel. Midnight Zone. Cologne: Museum Tinguely and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2025.

Julian Charrière (French-Swiss, b. Morges 1987) is an artist whose work explores the cultural and environmental histories embedded in natural landscapes. Spanning film, sculpture, photography, and installation, his practice often involves fieldwork in ecologically and symbolically charged sites — glaciers, volcanoes, nuclear test zones, and deep-sea ecosystems—examining how human activity inscribes itself into the planet’s surfaces, atmospheres, and futures.

Fusing scientific observation with poetic speculation, Charrière creates immersive works where wonder and unease coexist, probing the colonial and extractivist legacies embedded in exploration, landscape representation, and technologies of seeing. Born in Morges, Switzerland in 1987, he graduated from the Berlin University of Arts (UdK) and participated in Olafur Eliasson’s Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments). Charrière has exhibited his work internationally—both individually and as part of the Berlin-based collective Das Numen—at institutions including Museum Tinguely; Palais de Tokyo; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (MAMbo); MASI Lugano; the Parasol Unit Foundation for Art, London; the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne; the Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Kunsthalle Wien; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Reykjavik Art Museum; the K11 Foundation, Shanghai; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, among others. His work has also been featured in major biennials, including the Kochi-Muziris Biennale; the 12th Biennale de Lyon; the 13th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice; the 57th Venice Biennale; the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art; and the 14th Bienal de Artes Mediales de Santiago. Charrière was awarded the Kiefer Hablitzel / Swiss Art Award in 2013 and 2015, received the GASAG Art Prize in 2018, and was the recipient of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize at MOCA Los Angeles in 2024.