Future Fossil Spaces
2014
Future Fossil Spaces was first created for the spaces of the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne. The fossils mentioned in the title do not refer to traces of animal or plant life found in rocks, but to the Latin etymology of the word, which translates literally as “obtained from digging”, the action of the artist consisting therefore in proposing, in the present of the exhibition space, works that are in dialectical tension between the two arrows of time, one pointing to the past and the other towards the future. Unfolding on the floor are strangely beautiful coloured landscapes composed of enamelled steel basins filled with saline solutions from Argentinean lithium deposits, resembling the aerial view of the salt beds; rising up are tall columns of salt blocks from the same area marking the tension between a material of the future, lithium, and the length of time required to create the salt.
Polygon I
2014
black and white double exposure medium format film on baryta paper, steel frame, thermonuclear strata
152 x 182 centimeters
Unique
Inspired by J.G. Ballard's short story The Terminal Beach, Julian CHARRIÈRE has travelled to the Polygon of Semipalatinsk, in Kazakhstan, to shoot the video Somewhere and the photographic series Polygon. That site was the primary testing venue for the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons, where the first Soviet atomic bomb exploded in 1949, followed until 1989 by another 455 – a total explosive power over 2'500 times more than the Hiroshima bomb. The Polygon photographs were shot in the same place on analogue film, and submitted to radiation from sand taken on the site of the Polygon before their development. Thus they both depict the site of nuclear radiation and bear the actual trace of radioactivity's effects.
Polygon II
2014
black and white double exposure medium format film on baryta paper, steel frame, thermonuclear strata
152 x 182 centimeters
Unique
Inspired by J.G. Ballard's short story The Terminal Beach, Julian CHARRIÈRE has travelled to the Polygon of Semipalatinsk, in Kazakhstan, to shoot the video Somewhere and the photographic series Polygon. That site was the primary testing venue for the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons, where the first Soviet atomic bomb exploded in 1949, followed until 1989 by another 455 – a total explosive power over 2'500 times more than the Hiroshima bomb. The Polygon photographs were shot in the same place on analogue film, and submitted to radiation from sand taken on the site of the Polygon before their development. Thus they both depict the site of nuclear radiation and bear the actual trace of radioactivity's effects.
Polygon III
2014
black and white double exposure medium format film on baryta paper, steel frame, thermonuclear strata
152 x 182 centimeters
Unique
Inspired by J.G. Ballard's short story The Terminal Beach, Julian CHARRIÈRE has travelled to the Polygon of Semipalatinsk, in Kazakhstan, to shoot the video Somewhere and the photographic series Polygon. That site was the primary testing venue for the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons, where the first Soviet atomic bomb exploded in 1949, followed until 1989 by another 455 – a total explosive power over 2'500 times more than the Hiroshima bomb. The Polygon photographs were shot in the same place on analogue film, and submitted to radiation from sand taken on the site of the Polygon before their development. Thus they both depict the site of nuclear radiation and bear the actual trace of radioactivity's effects.
Polygon IV
2015
black and white double exposure medium format film on baryta paper, steel frame, thermonuclear strata
152 x 182 centimeters
Unique
Inspired by J.G. Ballard's short story The Terminal Beach, Julian CHARRIÈRE has travelled to the Polygon of Semipalatinsk, in Kazakhstan, to shoot the video Somewhere and the photographic series Polygon. That site was the primary testing venue for the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons, where the first Soviet atomic bomb exploded in 1949, followed until 1989 by another 455 – a total explosive power over 2'500 times more than the Hiroshima bomb. The Polygon photographs were shot in the same place on analogue film, and submitted to radiation from sand taken on the site of the Polygon before their development. Thus they both depict the site of nuclear radiation and bear the actual trace of radioactivity's effects.
