Prix Marcel Duchamp 2021
Julian Charrière

Oct 6th, 2021 – Jan 3rd, 2022
Centre Pompidou, Paris

Copyright the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Weight of Shadows

The sky grows heavy, thickened by the excess carbon dioxide that has been injected into the air since the Industrial Revolution. Its invisible weight—looming over us like a leaden shadow—is the starting point of Julian Charrière’s work. How not merely to represent an environment but to unveil the medium that we move through, and which simultaneously moves through us—that is the cosmological question at stake. Charrière’s work addresses the fading of a modern world-vision that sought to free itself from natural constraints and its transformation in the face of an increasingly dense atmosphere. In its place he negotiates an image of the world that we can no longer traverse as freely or carelessly, slowed by the density of unregulated carbon emissions that surround us.

To wrestle with these issues, Charrière joined a scientific expedition to the polar ice cap, a place where snow blurs boundary between ground and sky and the horizon vanishes. There he inverted the conventional mining process: rather than extracting huge hunks of minerals from the earth he gathered tiny molecules of carbon dioxide from the air. He expanded his collection by including the CO2-rich exhalations of people from across the world—a global breath that mirrors and symbolizes the place of the human within global carbon cycle.

Charrière’s cache of CO2 was then digested by archaea—microorganisms from the depths of the Earth that metabolise the CO2 into methane—before being vaporised in seemingly miraculous fashion into diamonds. Air, synonymous with lightness and softness, is thus alchemically transformed into the hardest naturally-ocurring mineral on the planet. Rather than keeping the diamonds, symbolic of wealth and precious excess, Charrière returns them to the polar ice cap, tossing them into a deep well drilled by flowing meltwater. With this gesture, Charriere adds another mineral layer to the open-air archive of successive deposits of atmospheric particles, which over time have formed the ice shield. In adding these shiny fragments to the strata, the artist engages with the paradox of the polar ice caps: they are silent oracles, far from “civilization,” yet they’ve been groaning, creaking, melting—crying out for decades without being heard.

Thus the installation is silent. The floor, a black mirror of polished coal, reflects the ceiling above, emphasizing the intercourse between ground and sky. Oil well drills and their bits, which have penetrated earth’s surface and passed through geological strata and time, stand in the room like ancient columns. One hangs above us, swordlike, its drillbit tipped with the sky diamonds that Charrière has created. And yet the installation is neither temple nor mortuary, but rather a floating space that amplifies the disorientation of the human position not simply on Earth, but also beneath the sky and in an atmosphere.

Copyright the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Photo Jens Ziehe

Charrière’s desire to understand the world as an interconnected organism, in which what exists above us and beneath us is expressed in the surfaces we see and interact with, echoes the work of the great 19th-century naturalists such as Alexander Von Humboldt. Von Humboldt traveled the world widely in order to study the ecological system in its totality: the flora down to their roots, the diversity of the fauna, the chemical composition of the air, the pull of gravity, the power of vulcanism, the blueness of the sky. His naturalistic studies hold powerful empirical and aesthetic importance.

Parallels can be found in Charrière’s project, which does not engage in the heroic gestures, of the lone artist railing at the immensity and indifference of the world, but rather positions the artist as part of a scientific collective, with a specific preoccupation in mind: “an increased belief in science cannot be achieved without a cultural parallel: there is a need for an art which helps to give sense to facts.” (Julian Charrière, 2021)

Copyright the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf; Photo Jens Ziehe

Prix Marcel Duchamp

The Centre Pompidou is hosting the 21st edition of the Prix Marcel Duchamp and presenting the works and installations of four artists who were nominated on 7 January 2021. Chosen by an international jury, the name of the winner of the 2021 edition will be revealed on Monday, October 18.

Established in 2000 to showcase the creative vibrancy of the French art scene, the Prix Marcel Duchamp rewards the most representative artists of their generation and promotes the current diversity of French production internationally. This long-standing partnership between the ADIAF (Association for the International Dissemination of French Art) and the Centre Pompidou is firmly committed to presenting the French scene to the broadest possible audience and to reinforcing our support for these artists in a context that is particularly marked by the pandemic.

This year, the four nominated artists are:

Julian Charrière
Isabelle Cornaro
Julien Creuzet
Lili Reynaud Dewar



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