Hard Core, French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière’s first solo exhibition in Australia, opened at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) today. The exhibition is on view through 29 March 2027.
Hard Core charts a descent into deep time, durations endured by stone and ice that dwarf human lifespans. It features an assemblage of artworks—from sculpture and installation to film and photography—that bridge nature, science, history, industry and myth.
Mona’s founder, DavId Walsh, said: ‘Ideas burst from Julian Charrière like licks from an over-friendly dog. Sometimes it’s a lot—attending one of Julian’s exhibitions can be overwhelming. But Julian isn’t a meddler. His ideas are deep and incisive, the sort of ideas that expose the soft white underbelly of reality.’
Hard Core transforms Mona’s touring galleries and spills out into the Void and newly excavated additions to the museum. It features sculptures made of coal, lava, molten computers, onyx and obsidian. Cored samples taken from glacial erratic boulders are repaired with steel, aluminium, brass and silver. A lump of stromatolite rock, hundreds of millions of years old, is slowly polished to a perfect sphere between lapidary rock grinders. There’s a plant preserved cryogenically, snails slurping the calcium carbonate from marble statues, and a vending machine full of fossilised ammonites.
In photographs and video installations, Charrière pits human action against ideas of nature’s grandeur and vulnerability. He transfigures human breath into diamond, for instance, by returning our expelled carbon to the rushing water of a glacier mill in North Greenland, and pilots drones through fireworks imploding over decommissioned oil rigs, open pit coal mines and other derelict sites of extractive industry.
With Breathe, a permanent installation commissioned especially for Mona and built into the museum’s foundations, Charrière releases oxygen molecules that have been trapped inside banded iron ore formations since the Great Oxidation Event some 2.4 billion years ago. Visitors are invited to inhale air that has been lodged in rock since oxygen’s consequential emergence on Earth.
Mona’s Director Curatorial Affairs, Jarrod Rawlins, said: ‘We like beautiful adventures, physically, emotionally and philosophically, and Breathe delivers that from every angle.’
Charrière has exhibited widely, but this is his first solo exhibition in Oceania.
Charrière said: ‘What’s special about this show is how it coalesces distinct works into a single geological body, compressing planetary timescales into a shared, stratigraphic architecture and encounter. Here, Mona acts as both figurative and literal bedrock—a boundary-pushing museum which, carved from sandstone, situates human civilization within a far older story; a story of stone and bone.’
‘Tasmania, too, is integral to the temporal dissonance of Hard Core: a primeval, almost Gondwanan place, where exhibiting feels less like placing works in a museum and more like returning them to the planetary condition to which they already belong,’ he said.
A full-colour exhibition catalogue including installation photography will be published later this year.
