Julian Charrière
Solarstalgia
Nov 28th, 2024 – Apr 20th, 2025
ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj
With ‘Solarstalgia’, opening on 28 November 2024, French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière takes audiences on a journey through woods past and present, reaching through deep time to the seeds of our environmental
crisis.
The exhibition constitutes Julian Charrière’s first solo show in Scandinavia, where visitors can look forward to a series of evocative and immersive forests, representative of the organic lifeforms that defined not only the course of life on Earth, but the very condition that sustains it.
Energy remains a prominent topic of conversation in Denmark and internationally, fuelled by climate change and global conflict. But what is often lost in the debate is a sense of scale for the vast lengths of time required for these sources of this energy to form. Solarstalgia explores this history and the consequences of our extraction culture – where natural landscapes are consistently reframed as natural resources to be mined, burned and transformed.
Julian Charrière creates works that connect the landscapes of the past with the challenges of our present day. Drawing on themes such as primordial forests and industrial extraction, he foregrounds the inextricable yet unstable bond between humankind and nature.
Curator Jenny Lund
From Carboniferous swamplands to palm oil plantations and the fossilised sunshine extracted from coal pits, the artist brings together a number of multimedia installations that each questions our unbalanced
relationship to the planet and to the plants whose custodianship long precedes our own. The title of 'Solarstalgia' speaks to this cosmic relationship, where photosynthesising organisms store solar energy in the
strata, as well as to the philosophical concept of solastalgia, meaning to feel ‘an existential longing or restlessness that arises when we experience environmental changes in places where we feel at home.’
Curator Jenny Lund adds: ‘The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to explore the work of a contemporary artist who both challenges and captivates us. Through his conceptually engaging and sensory immersive works, Julian Charrière prompts a profound reflection on the climate and energy implications of our actions.’
The exhibition is funded by:
New Carlsberg Foundation,
Beckett Foundation, and the
Obel Family Foundation.
