Julian Charrière
Controlled Burn
Sep 4th, 2022 – Aug 6th, 2023
Langen Foundation, Neuss
Deepening Charrière’s reflections upon evolving ideas of nature and our place therein, Controlled Burn dreams with fire.
Julian Charrière’s solo exhibition Controlled Burn will occupy the whole of the Tadao Ando designed Langen Foundation in Neuss, North Rhine-Westphalia, from 4 September 2022 to 6 August 2023. Featuring 8 new commissions set within a constellation of major works from Charrière’s oeuvre, Controlled Burn represents the artist’s most extensive exhibition to date.
Controlled Burn meditates upon 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 mounts an ambitious essay on the politics and poetics of combustion.
Charrière’s work addresses urgent ecological concerns, often stemming from fieldwork at signal locations such as volcanoes, glaciers, oil palm plantations, undersea and radioactive sites. Amid today’s entwined climate and energy crises, Controlled Burn interrogates the dark vitality of materials used for fuel: coal, petroleum, palm oil, sunshine. Taking us back in time, deep underground and into future atmospheres and oceans saturated by the burnt residues of modernity’s excess, Charrière’s speculative visions range over the fossilized life-worlds of past geological ages, the agency of plants in shaping planetary futures, and humankind’s fraught grip on fire.
Julian Charrière, Controlled Burn, 2022, film still
As an opening gesture, the show welcomes visitors to wander through a panchronic garden a seemingly endless greenhouse full of plants bathed in infrared light, under which they glow jet-black. The newly commissioned installation evokes the history of coal mined in North Rhine-Westphalia, and the vast Carboniferous forests that grew there 300 million years ago. Deep within the museum’s modernist edifice, a classical fountain spills liquid flames (And Beneath it All Flows Liquid Fire, 2019) as a handful of synthetic diamonds are dumped down a hole in the melting Greenlandic icecap (Pure Waste, 2021). Hidden beneath a ramp, a pair of robotic arms rub together flints in a mechanical bid to re-enact humanity’s primeval theft of fire (Untitled, 2022).
The namesake of the exhibition is a major new video work, which invites the viewer to soar through an aerial landscape of imploding fireworks. Shot with a first-person drone, this spectacular temporal voyage journeys from unfurling ferns and fluttering moths to rusting cooling towers, decommissioned oil rigs and open pit mines. Spanning a vast cavern of deep time, Controlled Burn (2022) arrives in the present as a dazzling celebration of biological adaption and technological obsolescence. Partly powered with solar energy harvested by a site-specific sculpture, the exhibition features installations that allude to the location’s prior use as a rocket storage facility.
Press Release
JULIAN CHARRIÈRE’S SOLO SHOW CONTROLLED BURN AT THE LANGEN FOUNDATION OPENS 4 SEPTEMBER 2022
Berlin/Neuss, 1 September 2022 – 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.
Julian Charrière: “The new works invite the viewer to confront and encounter the relationship between fossil fuels, imagination, and the natural landscape. From making sparks with flint to devastating explosions, and from oil rigs and open-pit mines to panchronic gardens, the artworks mediate our history with fire as an immersive dimension.”
Curators Dehlia Hannah and Nadim Samman: “Europe today faces an unprecedented energy crisis, in which environmental goals collide with urgent political priorities. As European nations restart shuttered coal-fired power plants and nuclear reactors, Controlled Burn confronts our alienation from the materials, processes, and infrastructure that make the continuous flow of energy possible at the flip of a switch. In this exhibition, fires burning underground, outside the city limits, in distant pasts and futures, are brought life for our imagination.”
Tensions between the mythos and infrastructure of fire form the exhibition’s central axis of concern. The titular work, Controlled Burn, is a major new video that invites the viewer to soar through an endless display of imploding fireworks. Shot by drone in first-person perspective, this aerial voyage traverses rusting cooling towers, decommissioned oil rigs, and open-pit mines, amid which viewers glimpse flashes of unfurling ferns and fluttering moths. The newly commissioned Panchronic Garden invites visitors to enter a coal seam in the process of becoming. Growing under infrared lamps in a seemingly endless greenhouse, the dense thicket of foliage appears jet black before our eyes, evoking the history of coal mined in the region of North Rhine-Westphalia and the vast Carboniferous forests that grew there 300 million years ago. As visitors commune with the ghosts of beings whose fossilized remains power our present dreams and environmental nightmares, a pair of robotic arms rub together flints in a mechanical bid to reenact humanity’s primeval theft of fire. Karla Zerressen, Director of the Langen Foundation: “Julian Charrière’s work addresses the urgencies of our time by drawing our attention to often overlooked subjects. Through depictions of endangered nature that are equal parts beautiful and alarming, Julian’s work initiates a dialogue that invites viewers to dig deeper. The Langen Foundation, designed by Tadao Ando, becomes an integral part of this conversation as Charrière uses the building’s architecture to navigate tension and calm.”
