The fascinations of the Arctic and Antarctic have captured our collective imagination for centuries. For the last decade, French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière has traveled to remote and hostile polar regions to explore humankind’s interconnection with these otherworldly environments that have come to represent the precariousness of our future.
The artist’s first solo exhibition on the West Coast, Julian Charrière: Erratic at SFMOMA presents works across media that revolve around the artist’s poetic engagement with ice landscapes challenging our constructs of different temporalities, while bringing attention to the traces and longstanding reverberations humankind has caused throughout planetary systems. The central work of this cinematic and sensory filled exhibition is Towards No Earthly Pole (2019), a panoramic film combining haunting footage of glaciers taken at night during the artist’s expeditions to various glacial regions.
Through immersive encounters with Charrière’s work in this timely exhibition, visitors are invited to approach an environmentally, culturally, and politically charged geography with a heightened sense of ecological awareness.
