Julian Charrière
Kairos Resounding
Duo Exhibition with Laurent Grasso

798CUBE is pleased to announce Kairos Resounding, a duo-solo exhibition by Julian Charrière and Laurent Grasso, curated by Zhang Ga. Opening April 25, 2026, and on view through August 30, 2026, the exhibition brings together two internationally acclaimed artists whose practices investigate time, perception, and planetary transformation through distinct yet deeply resonant approaches. Kairos Resounding marks the first institutional solo presentation in China for both artists.

The exhibition unfolds across the majestic environs of glaciers, atmospheres, and datascapes, traversing submerged, terrestrial, and celestial scales. Invoking kairos, the ancient Greek conception of a critical and decisive temporality, the exhibition foregrounds contemporary conditions in which time no longer unfolds continuously under the regime of chronos, but instead precipitates as ruptures that reverberate across ecological, technological, and epistemic systems. In an era shaped by climate crisis and accelerated computation, kairos emerges as a reckoning of the future, an excavation of the past, and an exigency of the present—where scientific speculation, premodern occultism, and more-than-human agencies intersect. Such time resounds with geological fragility, anthropogenic recursion, and a multiplicity of reflections—immense yet immediate. Kairos thus appear as both the time-image of Jetztzeit (now-time), propelled by the urgency of the now, and the messianic time erupting from time ad infinitum. It is under such a precipitation of temporality that we encounter the material time transpired by Julian Charrière and the metaphysical time inscribed by Laurent Grasso.

In works such as The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories (2013), Towards No Earthly Pole (2019), and Albedo (2025), among others, that confront viewers with Earth systems exceeding human temporality, Charrière heightens a kairotic moment through planetary thresholds in situ. His expeditionary voyages extend our sensory regime to some of Earth’s furthest reaches and deepest oceanic zones, reenacting a phenomenological immediacy of remoteness and immensity while soliciting a visceral empathy that seeks to reconcile the irredeemable trauma of the Anthropocene. Foraying into the intricate sciences of volcanology, glaciology, oceanography, and geophysics, the artist activates an uncanny sensorium of a palpitating Earth, where geological violence and climatic vulnerability illuminate both the entanglement and the collision of nature’s forces with the pervasive hubris of humanity.

Laurent Grasso manifests kairos as epistemic ruptures. His conceptual dramatology and perceptual scenography summon alternative regimes of knowledge in which ancestral wisdom acquires renewed potentiality, speculative instruments retrieve the present from foregone eras, atmospheric phenomena become philosophical apparatuses, and amorphous signals destabilize the certainties of scientific modernity. In doing so, the artist suggests a futurity in which intellect may spring from indigenous sagacity and psychic acumen may give rise to technics yet to come. Through works such as Otto (2018), ARTIFICIALIS (2021), Anima (2022), Studies into the Past (undated), and Clouds Theory (2024), Grasso constructs a cosmology in which perception itself is put on hold, and time appears as a quantum entanglement between archaic cosmologies and contemporary technological paradigms, among many other regimens of knowing and doubting.

Employing the camera as planetary sensor and epistemological actuator, their idiosyncratic formal strategies converge to produce a direct “time-image,” in which, as French philosopher Gilles Deleuze writes, “the cinema of fiction and the cinema of reality blur their difference; descriptions become purely optical and sound, narrations falsifying and stories simulation.” At the same time, this time-image becomes both a visceral embodiment of immensity and a sober meditation on monumentality. Immensity appears as kairotic time leaping forward from Charrière’s deep eons of a glacial mill and recoiling in Grasso’s formidable spillway. It is an immensity that reverberates from ancestral time into the critical Now-Time (Jetztzeit), while monumentality resists the romantic vista of the toxic sublime.

Kairotic time-image further evokes the “time that remains,” an Agambenian messianic temporality, a renewed Jetztzeit of contemporaneity, a time of exigency calling for immediate action out of the remainder of time, albeit divested of faith-ordained redemption and eschatological finality. It reveals a world thickened by ecological thresholds and epistemic estrangement, enduring without resolution. The exhibition leaves the visitor between evidence and apparition, lingering in time zones of past and future. What resounds is not closure but pressure—the vibration of a present in which time itself becomes the medium of accountability.

Through film, sculpture, photography, and immersive installations, Kairos Resounding invites viewers to inhabit a contracted now shaped by planetary entanglement, where urgency replaces prophecy and responsibility supersedes transcendence, and to refigure such a timely paradox: “the saved world coincides with the world that is irretrievably lost.” - Giorgio Agamben

Kairos “is the time that we ourselves are.” – Agamben, and resounding.