Breathing 2.4 Billion Years: Julian Charrière’s Descent into Deep Time at Mona.
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There are exhibitions you visit. And there are exhibitions you descend into.
From 6 June 2026, in the excavated sandstone chambers of Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art, Julian Charrière’s Hard Core does the latter. Timed to open alongside the winter solstice theatre of Dark Mofo, it feels less like a show than a pressure system - one that builds quietly, geologically, until you realise you are breathing differently.
Charrière has long worked at the fault line where science stops being explanatory and starts being existential. Trained in Berlin at Olafur Eliasson’s Institut für Raumexperimente, he absorbed the idea that research is not an accessory to art but its substrate. His practice has taken him to Arctic glaciers, volcanic ridges and former nuclear test sites - environments where matter carries memory and landscape behaves like archive.
At Mona, that archive becomes tactile.
Coal sits beside lava. Onyx and obsidian share space with sculptures cast from molten computers - motherboards liquefied back into mineral anonymity. The gesture is not theatrical destruction. It is restitution. The so-called cloud dissolves into copper and silicon; the fantasy of digital immateriality collapses into ore. Every swipe, every streamed image, is underwritten by extraction. Charrière does not illustrate this fact - he melts it down.
Nearby, glacial erratics - boulders ferried across continents by vanished ice sheets - are cored and sutured with aluminium, brass, steel and silver. The repairs gleam like surgical staples. They do not pretend to restore purity. Instead, they insist on entanglement: industry as wound, industry as prosthesis. The materials are not symbolic. Aluminium refining remains one of the most energy-intensive industrial processes on earth; steel and coal remain structurally embedded in global infrastructure. The works hold that contradiction in place.
One of the quietest pieces may be the most destabilising. A stromatolite - formed by cyanobacteria billions of years ago and instrumental in oxygenating the planet - is placed in the steady grip of lapidary grinders. Over months, it is polished into a sphere. The machines hum without drama. What microbial colonies accrued across deep time yields to geometric idealism. It is difficult to watch without sensing the asymmetry between natural accumulation and human impatience.
Elsewhere, snails graze on marble statues, metabolising high culture back into calcium. A vending machine dispenses fossilised ammonites as if deep time were a convenience purchase. The humour lands lightly, then lingers. Consumption here is not metaphor. It is chemistry.
Charrière’s films widen the field. Drones are piloted through fireworks detonating above decommissioned oil rigs and exhausted open-pit coal mines. The images are operatic - brief constellations flaring against industrial skeletons - yet the context is precise. Thousands of offshore platforms worldwide approach the end of their operational lives, posing complex environmental and economic dilemmas. The fireworks do not redeem these structures. They illuminate their afterlife.
At the core of Hard Core is Breathe, a permanent installation embedded within Mona’s foundations. Oxygen molecules trapped inside banded iron formations since the Great Oxidation Event - approximately 2.4 billion years ago, when microbial life transformed Earth’s atmosphere - are released into the gallery space. Visitors inhale air that predates bone.
The science is crucial. When oxygen first accumulated in the atmosphere, it was toxic to many existing life forms. Catastrophe and evolution were chemically intertwined. By inviting visitors to breathe this ancient oxygen, Charrière reframes environmental discourse. Atmospheric change is not unprecedented. What is unprecedented is its speed, and our agency within it.
To inhale that air is to experience time not as narrative but as exchange. You are not looking at history. You are metabolising it.
Mona, founded by David Walsh, has always gravitated toward extremity. Carved into sandstone older than civilisation, it feels less like a neutral container than a geological incision. Hard Core exploits this condition, seeping into the Void and newly excavated chambers as if the works were being returned to their elemental state.
Tasmania sharpens the resonance. This is an island where Gondwanan ecologies persist, where mining and conservation remain in tension, where landscape is both ancient and politically charged. Charrière’s materials do not feel imported. They feel local in tempo, if not in origin.
What distinguishes Hard Core from more didactic strands of climate art is its resistance to simplification. Coal is fossilised sunlight and carbon liability. Oxygen is gift and historical toxin. Marble is monument and mollusc feed. The binaries soften under pressure.
You leave the museum and re-enter daylight. The Derwent moves as it always has. Your phone reconnects to satellites and servers. Yet something has shifted - minutely, materially. You have inhaled air older than vertebrates. You have watched stone yield. You have seen circuitry return to magma.
The core is not hidden in the earth. It is the condition of being entangled with it.
Hard, dense, inescapable.
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Words by AW.
Photo courtesy of MONA.
