Julian Charrière dives deep at Museum Tinguely with ‘Midnight Zone’

This summer, Museum Tinguely in Basel presents Midnight Zone, a groundbreaking solo exhibition by the French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière, running from June 11th to November 2nd, 2025. Across three immersive floors, Julian Charrière invites visitors into the elusive world of water, investigating its physical properties, poetic resonance, and critical environmental role. With Midnight Zone, Museum Tinguely becomes a portal into submerged ecologies where perception, memory, and climate converge.

Midnight Zone draws its name from the bathypelagic layer of the ocean—a depth beyond sunlight, where darkness reigns and familiar visual cues dissolve. For Julian Charrière, this unlit realm serves as both subject and metaphor. Known for his field-based, research-driven practice, artist fuses science, art, and documentary aesthetics. At Museum Tinguely, Midnight Zone features sculpture, photography, sound, and several new films that immerse audiences in the fluid tensions between progress and collapse.

In the titular film Midnight Zone (2025), a lighthouse lens descends into blackness—not to illuminate certainty but to reveal fragmentation. In another standout work, Albedo (2025), shot beneath Arctic ice, Julian Charrière captures water’s transitions from solid to vapor to liquid, transforming melting into a quiet act of environmental reckoning. These works, shown at Museum Tinguely, demonstrate how artist visualizes climate not as catastrophe alone, but as an unfolding choreography of disappearance.

Midnight Zone at Museum Tinguely marks a key moment in Julian Charrière’s career, deepening his inquiry into the Anthropocene through a marine lens. Dive into our interview with Julian Charrière, where we discuss perception, planetary fragility, and the deep sea as a metaphor for the human condition.