Ahead of Art Basel, French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière opened a new exhibition at the Tinguely Museum that invites the art world to take a deep dive into water—its healing, regenerative and essential vitality—as a way to reestablish a connection with nature. In this magical, almost mystical show, Charrière urges visitors to step away from the capitalist, fast-paced, profit-driven mindset of the art fair and art market system—even before their summer break—and instead slow down, attune body and mind to the rhythms of the abyss, and reconsider our place within a fragile ecology.
Titled “Midnight Zone,” the exhibition revolves around Charrière’s latest video work—an immersive homage to the rich, often invisible biodiversity of the deep sea, where flora and fauna thrive beyond human reach. It’s a realm largely inaccessible not only to our bodies and senses but also to our scientific probing, yet one upon which much of life on Earth depends.
“Midnight Zone is the starting point of a longer journey—a kind of abyssal dream machine that casts light into the unknown,” Charrière told Observer after the press walkthrough. The entire exhibition is an attempt to illuminate a possible expedition into the fragile ecosystems that dwell in oceanic darkness.
The institutional space has been subtly—almost ceremonially—reclaimed by water: by the sea, by the ocean. Visitors immerse themselves in a fluid, sensory world that merges the physical and the subconscious, guiding us back to our primordial bond with water—the source of all life, and the place to which all matter eventually returns in the endless circulation of particles. “We are all part of the world and the world is part of us,” Charrière said early in the press tour, grounding the show’s meditative rhythm. “Midnight Zone” casts a light not just on biodiversity,” he continued, “but on the structures of perception and ambition that frame our relationship to the unknown. It’s a descent into beauty as well as into the contradictions of exploration, extraction and ecological intimacy on a planetary scale.”
Many marine species communicate through frequencies that fall outside the range of human perception—a sensory inaccessibility that Charrière addresses directly in the show. “It’s a central theme, and it begins the moment one enters the exhibition,” he explains. Visitors step into a darkened corridor that at first seems silent. But slowly, a faint crackling begins to emerge: a soft staccato of clicks and pops from the sound installation Choralography. Most won’t recognize the source immediately, according to the artist, but these are the living acoustics of a thriving coral reef. “It’s an invitation to reorient perception—to understand that even spaces we think we know are layered with signals beyond the visual. This first auditory encounter becomes a point of departure: how do we relate to ecologies we cannot fully sense? What dimensions of knowledge remain hidden when we privilege sight over other forms of experience?”
As the walls grow darker, a creeping sonic uncanniness begins to take hold, revealing the dissonance between how sound travels through air and how it moves through water more than four times faster. This difference is not merely scientific but profoundly experiential, and Charrière recreates it through a gradual distortion. As we move deeper into the exhibition, the soundscape shifts subtly from a vibrant, biophonic symphony—alive with the rhythms of marine life—into a thinner, more brittle acoustic field. In this transition, the presence of anthropophony—the sonic imprint of human activity—emerges slowly but unmistakably, overpowering the reef’s natural voices and exposing the fragility of these ecosystems under continuous intrusion.
Interestingly, the submarine journey Charrière stages begins with Mexican cenotes—natural sinkholes that, in Mayan cosmology, were revered as sacred portals, thresholds between the human world and the underworld. Emerging from the darkness of a room softly lit with dimly calibrated light, a series of photographs appears to float in suspension, capturing the ascending and descending gestures of human bodies caught between dimensions. In Where Waters Meet, freedivers traverse a chemocline, a cloudy boundary of sulfur-rich bottom water, marking not only a physical transition but also an inward passage into altered perception and elemental memory.
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In this subconscious liquid space, the body depicted becomes one with the water, with the flow, with its surroundings. “We are all part of the world and the world is part of us,” the artist says. Entering a cenote is not merely a physical act—it is a portal, the first step in a symbolic descent into the subconscious, aligning with what has been described as the “oceanic feeling,” a rare sensation of complete oneness with nature. In this way, the ocean becomes not just the backdrop for transcendence but its very embodiment—a realm where the boundaries between self and world dissolve.
Following this initiation, the exhibition deepens—both sensorially and conceptually. Charrière begins to play with theatrical light and sound, guiding us into the abyss via subtle cues. Here, new frequencies reveal and test the outer edges of human perception, exposing the thresholds where our senses begin to falter. “Much of this acoustic activity lies outside human perception—either too low or too high, or occurring in conditions we cannot physically withstand,” Charrière explains, quoting science writer Amorina Kingdon, who reminds us that “the ocean is a hall of voices, most of them beyond our hearing.”
In the pioneering video installation Silent World (Monde de Silence), Charrière delves deeper into the limits of sensory perception beneath the ocean’s surface, where sound drifts beyond the grasp of human ears. The piece centers on a minimal yet immersive gesture: a video projected into water, where sunlight and vapor converge in quiet choreography. What at first appears to be fire burning underwater reveals itself as a reversed perspective—sunlight captured from beneath the surface, rising upward as viewers gaze down into the basin.
As the caption explains, the title references Jacques Cousteau’s groundbreaking film Le Monde du Silence, one of the first to capture moving images from the ocean depths. Though Cousteau’s earliest dives were paradoxically financed by oil companies seeking new extraction technologies, the footage inadvertently revealed the ocean’s beauty and fragility. Charrière reactivates this contradiction, showing how the very forces that endanger marine ecosystems have also made them visible, inviting reflection on our role in damaging the planet and the possibility of preservation.
Yet Charrière also stages a series of sensorial and sculptural interventions that return us to a more physical, more visual encounter with these remote realms we can access, but so often commodify. In Spiral Economy, a vending machine filled with ammonites and fossils evokes the logic of a cabinet of curiosities, transforming remnants of deep time into collectible commodities—a past turned into product, history and natural culture sold by the coin. Elsewhere, Silent World – Saratoga presents a photo series capturing the sunken kitchen of the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, now resting at the bottom of Bikini Atoll’s lagoon. Submerged and partially entombed by rising seas, the wreck exists in a state of suspended transformation—at once historical artifact and living ecosystem. Poised between ruin and renewal, it becomes a hybrid object where memory and biology converge, further dissolving inherited dichotomies between nature and culture. As the captions suggest, Charrière invites us to see the ocean not as an infinite resource, but as a fragile, imperiled reservoir of life poised between extraction and extinction, spiraling toward an uncertain future.
Further down in the exhibition, Calipso features a Corbusier chaise longue paired with an oxygen device, evoking both the promise of life and survival underwater and the lurking presence of potential toxicity. The human—fragile, animal, unadapted—is portrayed here as homo faber, reliant on tools and technologies to persist, yet already destabilized in its psychosomatic balance by the disconnection modern society has created from its primordial bond with natural cycles and energies. And still, in this suspended state, sustained by machines, we are compelled into introspection and confronted by the void and the limits of our physical and bodily capacities, though perhaps not those of the spirit and imagination.
In this sense, the entire exhibition poetically hacks into the intricate web of life that binds humans to thousands of other species. At a moment when capitalism is in crisis, and with it, the collapse of an anthropocentric worldview, artists have emerged as vital voices in reimagining interspecies relations. “These, for me, are about shifting perception and finding ways to attune to life-worlds that exist far beyond what human senses can usually access,” Charrière says.
In Albedo, the artist invites viewers to move through the ocean like a cetacean, navigating by pressure and vibration rather than sight, as the submerged world is projected onto the museum’s ceiling. “It was a way to step out of our habitual frame,” he explains. Shot in the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean, the video flips our perspective on the imaginaries that have long shaped our understanding of both the deep sea and deep space. One of the most disorienting yet immersive works in the exhibition invites viewers to lie upside down, gazing at the water of melting glaciers and icebergs the artist filmed in Iceland. This inverted perspective becomes a portal into the subconscious, a destabilizing descent into the eternal flux of all matter. Albedo destabilizes our sense of orientation by inverting the viewer’s gaze and invites a reexamination of the natural cycles that lie above, below and within our understanding.
In another work shaped by three years of research, Charrière follows water in its many forms—ice, vapor, liquid—while exposing the gap in pace between human and ecological time. Across different landscapes and times, with Pitch Drop, Charrière follows ever-changing states of water: with a total of 1,000 individual drops, this piece is designed to span a symbolic 10,000-year timeframe, a temporal scale that reaches beyond the horizon of human history. Continuity becomes the structure, echoing how memory itself is built in unbroken, nonlinear flux.
This same elemental fluidity underpins Charrière’s long alchemical experiment to produce diamonds, not from the Earth, but from the sky. As he explains during the walkthrough, he extracted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the course of three years, materializing it into synthetic diamonds that glisten like condensed sky. In footage filmed in Icelandic waters under an intense blue light, he swims, or perhaps glides, over underwater ice, where trapped particles of water, air and sky shimmer with quiet urgency. These fragile constellations hint at the world that could be, but which we are steadily eroding. The artist calls this process sky mining—a poetic dematerialization of carbon into crystalline matter, at once speculative and critical.
In contrast, Coalface, a sculptural work made from polished anthracite coal, grounds this cosmic reach in the sediment of history. Its curved surface, reminiscent of a funhouse mirror, offers a warped reflection of the viewer, distorted by the very material that powered the industrial age. Dimly illuminated by a flickering oil lamp, the work confronts us with our emotional detachment from nature, inviting us to reckon with the extractive systems we continue to inhabit. Coalface doesn’t just recall the past but also implicates us in its ongoing combustion.
Threaded through these works is Charrière’s interest in how we construct meaning through images—especially images of the past. “The way we use images from the past is how we cope with our presence,” he clarifies. Whether reflecting on ice melting in 2013, diamonds formed from the atmosphere or coal carved into mirrors, his practice is a quiet call to reframe our place within the planetary archive, not as distant observers but as accountable participants.
The central work, Midnight Zone, continues this search but proposes another kind of attunement: both the installation and the film ask what it means to approach subjectivities we can’t fully understand. Here, the intermittent light of a lantern acts as a central energetic nucleus—a kind of glowing brain—becoming a key point of orientation. Like an underwater bonfire, it draws both marine life and visitors into its orbit, creating a site of encounter, a platform for a ritual of reconnection. And yet, as Charrière notes, it also intrudes, piercing the darkness with artificial light. “It questions how we enter these spaces, and what our presence changes.”
“The deep ocean is often imagined as silent, but that’s a surface illusion,” he says. “Below, there is constant sound: the groaning of tectonic plates, the snap of shrimp claws, the whirring of cephalopods and the blunt intrusions of sonar and air guns.” The ocean is an echo chamber of the ever-changing and too rapidly changing balances in our biosphere.
In Black Smoker, for instance, the artist brings us a fragment of the vast unknown in the ocean’s darkest zones, where light never penetrates and life persists under extreme conditions of pressure and heat. In this immersive sound installation, Charrière makes these inaccessible depths perceptible through a composition of field recordings gathered with hydrophones, alongside seismic monitoring data and archival scientific material. The work captures the raw sonic textures of the deep sea, from the crackling release of subterranean gases to the thunderous eruptions of stone and magma from underwater calderas. A multi-channel sound system transports listeners to remote underwater landscapes such as the abyssal plains off Oahu, the Monterey Submarine Canyons, the hydrothermal vents near Panarea and the Axial Seamount off Oregon’s coast. Layered into this acoustic environment is a spectral “choir” of ancient voices, evoking the enduring rhythms and vibrations that have pulsed through these submerged worlds for millennia—soundscapes that remain largely unheard, yet form the planet’s most elemental chorus.
Throughout the show, the sensorial inaccessibility of a broader range of natural phenomena is not revealed through direct translation but through the careful construction of an atmosphere that evokes the limits of our own perception while gesturing toward ritualistic, alternative ways of expanding it. By tapping into other perceptive and spiritual realms, Charrière invites a different kind of attunement. “It’s not a naturalistic soundscape but a kind of speculative ecology: a space where vibration, pressure and resonance displace narrative,” he explains. “It is a place where the body listens before the mind comprehends.”
In this exhibition, the artist engages with the material, political and spiritual dimensions of water. Describing it as “the first skin of the Earth,” the works on view reveal water’s dual nature—both sacred and mundane, life-sustaining and increasingly under threat. But Charrière’s artistic practice has long centered on creating fractures within the dominant frameworks of narrative and perception—modern systems that favor distance, clarity and classification as the primary ways of apprehending the world. “Sound, especially when untethered from its sources, offers another encounter mode. One that’s intimate, disorienting and porous,” he notes.
Here, sound becomes a tool to provoke a physical shift in perspective beyond the limits of ordinary human sensory experience. “Throughout the show, there are shifts in perspective that try to undo the usual distance between us and the other species we affect,” Charrière says. “In the soundscape, for example, the overwhelming presence of human-made noise reminds us that our intrusion is already inscribed into the ocean’s fabric.” We are never outside these systems, he reminds us—we shape them, often unconsciously.
“There’s a politics to listening,” he adds. “Ecosystems without a voice are easier to ignore. But once we begin to tune in, these environments gain presence. They become not just abstract spaces of data or resource potential, but places with texture, language and agency.” Marine ecosystems, he says, are already speaking—not necessarily to us, but even in communicating among themselves, they assert their existence. “The question is whether we are willing to enter that conversation, knowing we may never fully understand its terms,” Charrière pointedly notes.
Charrière’s seductive aesthetic of beautifully composed photographs, sculptural repetition and theatrical lighting immerses viewers in transporting sensations while provoking critical thought about ecological resilience, complicity and planetary futures. As he explains, the aural becomes a way of undoing the visual’s grip, as if the sonic dimension were already a space of suspension, dislodging the ordinary sensory orientation that keeps us grounded in a human-centric mode of perception that often makes it easier to ignore the broader spectrum of life, beyond and within us.
Ultimately, Charrière uses contemporary media to stage a kind of perceptual hack—an experiential exercise where ritual, mythopoesis, technology and time converge into a holistic encounter, reawakening the senses and gently guiding us to recognize the dense web of interdependencies in which we are already entangled.
Midnight Zone was conceived for the dual and eponymous exhibition at Museum Tinguely and developed in close collaboration with Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg—an exhibition years in the making, delayed by the pandemic—but the work had its first public presentation not in a museum, but on the beach in Baja California, facing the Pacific Ocean. Oriented westward toward the Clarion–Clipperton Fracture Zone, this premiere was later followed by a presentation at the Museo de Historia Natural y Cultural Ambiental.
Although Midnight Zone was not made specifically for Mexico, its debut there acknowledged the country’s deep relevance, as Charrière confirms—a geographic and ecological proximity connected to one of the most contested environmental frontiers of our time. “This premiere on Mexican soil was never about site-specificity in a narrow sense. It was about orientation,” he explains. “Standing at the edge of that coastline, the work opened a perceptual corridor toward an area few will ever see: a vast, mineral-rich abyss currently being surveyed and parcelled for future exploitation.” In that context, the work resonated with the urgency of its surroundings. “The ocean there was not an abstraction but a presence, breathing against the coast. The threat felt tangible.” Set against a backdrop where the immensity of nature compels both confrontation and surrender, the conversation around sovereignty, extraction and ecological uncertainty was already underway. Midnight Zone “entered that discourse as a kind of lens: not offering answers, but opening a space for encounter.”
Now presented in Basel at Museum Tinguely, the exhibition also coincides with the centenary of Jean Tinguely’s birth—a pioneering figure who pushed the boundaries of art beyond the permanence of form, a pursuit echoed in Charrière’s own multimedia practice. When asked whether he sees any affinities between his work and the Swiss artist’s legacy, Charrière said he resonated with Tinguely’s deep understanding of entropy—his machines never striving for perfection or permanence. “They exist in a state of motion, breakdown and fragility,” he observes. “While my own work doesn’t use mechanics in the same way, I share that interest in unstable systems—whether environmental, technological or perceptual. I’m drawn to gestures that reveal how things function and, just as often, how they fail.”
At the same time, as the artist notes, there’s also a shared commitment to sensory complexity. “Tinguely’s machines clatter and pulse in space, generating a kind of embodied noise,” Charrière reflects, noting how his own installations similarly operate through sound, vibration, temperature or spatial disorientation—strategies that aim to immerse the viewer and shift their sense of orientation. “It’s not just about representing an idea, but letting it resonate through the body. In that way, I think we both engage with materiality as something that operates across registers—visual, sonic, haptic—and that remains in flux rather than fixed.”
Showing Midnight Zone at Museum Tinguely during the centenary of Jean Tinguely’s birth feels like a meaningful coincidence, Charrière considers. “His legacy opens a space for thinking about artworks not as static objects, but as experiences unfolding over time—fragile, performative and entangled with their surroundings.”
As the museum sits on the banks of the Rhine, in a landlocked country, the coordinates shift from Baja California’s ecosystems, but the entanglement remains here on the same river where, once a year, many from the international art world gather to swim and float. “The Rhine flows past the museum, shaped by centuries of human industry, contamination and hydrological control. Its waters carry sediment, memory and consequence,” Charrière reflects. “We are no longer at the edge of the abyss, but we remain downstream from its effects.”
What shifts here is not the meaning of the work, but the framework through which it is presented, perceived and contextualized. “From the Pacific trench to the Alpine riverbed, these are not separate realities. They are points within a single, circulating system,” the artist explains, emphasizing how the work ultimately becomes a call to recognize continuity—to understand the deep sea not as distant, but as embedded within the systems we inhabit. “Whether shown in Mexico, in Basel or beyond, its message remains: there is no elsewhere. There is only the fragile, flowing present we all inhabit.”
Midnight Zone asks us to dissolve the illusion of distance—to see that what happens far away is already arriving, whether by current, climate or collapse. Charrière’s work revives a more soulful connection between human existence and its environment, inviting a shift in how we relate to the systems we already inhabit. “I believe one of the most vital roles of art today is to recalibrate our ways of sensing—to offer new alignments between perception and the world around us,” he says toward the end of our discussion. “So much of what shapes our reality now operates at scales that escape direct comprehension: planetary systems, deep time, geological change, the circulation of ocean currents or atmospheric shifts. These things are real, yet difficult to fully grasp. Art draws us closer to them not by explaining, but by allowing us to feel their presence.”
For Charrière, art serves as a tuning device—a kaleidoscope through which we might attune ourselves anew to the living world and the complex, often invisible systems we inhabit. “Art can open space for proximity—proximity to the non-human, the elemental, the long-durational,” he reflects. “That kind of intimacy with the unfamiliar or the vast can lead to a different kind of understanding, one rooted in resonance rather than reason. I see art as a medium of encounter. Not just with nature, but with forces greater than ourselves—attraction systems, geophysical rhythms or temporalities that move beyond the human lifespan. These are not things we can control, or even always describe, but we can sense their pull.”
In Midnight Zone, Charrière creates a space where that pull can be acknowledged—where it can be felt. Rather than striving to decode or resolve the world, he proposes a different approach: to stay with its complexity, to dwell in it. “To allow wonder, slowness and care to re-enter our field of experience,” he suggests. And perhaps, he hints, it is precisely that shift in experience—quiet, perceptual and deeply embodied—that makes other forms of transformation possible.
Julian Charrière’s “Midnight Zone” is on view at Museum Tinguely through November 2, 2025.
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