Julian Charrière
Black Smoker
15 NOV 2025 until 10 JAN 2026
Opening 15 NOV 2025, 6-9 pm
DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM is proud to announce our sixth solo show with Julian Charrière, titled Black Smoker, on view from November 15, 2025 through January 10, 2026.
Axial Seamount (29.12.2024) Spectrogram and waveform still, 46.0600°N, 130.0000° W Axial Seamount (date: 29.12.2024 – hour: 00:10 CET)
Credit: Victor Mazón Gardoqui
In Black Smoker, visitors are thrust into a sensory threshold, a plunge into the abyssal regions of the ocean where human presence collapses against the unfathomable. It is an encounter with a reality that defies comprehension, a world usually sealed off in darkness. Black Smoker transforms the gallery space of DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM into a dark expanse alive with seismic energy: the roar of underwater volcanoes, the hiss of hydrothermal vents, the rumble of collapsing slopes, and the molten surge of magmatic currents tearing through the planet’s crust. Black Smoker suspends the visitor inside a sonic vault, immersing them in a realm of crushing weight, blistering heat, and infinite night.
In the second gallery room, Charrière presents a wall-mounted iteration of Spiral Economy, a sculptural vending machine built from the DNA of trade, currency, and consumption. The work challenges the illusion of limitless extraction and urges viewers to confront time on a geological scale. It reimagines the ocean not as an infinite resource, but as a fragile, imperiled reservoir of life, held in the balance between extraction and extinction, spiraling toward an uncertain future.
Alongside this, the exhibition unveils new motifs from Midnight Zone, Charrière’s haunting photog raphic series shot in the Clarion-Clipperton fracture zone. Here, the artist captures the marine ecosystem above the mineral-rich seafloor under the looming threat of deep-sea mining. The work becomes both witness and elegy: a meditation on a luminous community at risk, and a subtle reflection on our entanglement with this submerged world.
Black Smoker follows on the heels of Charrière’s acclaimed exhibition Midnight Zone at Museum Tinguely, Basel and preludes his upcoming solo exhibition at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, opening March 2026. In addition to the exhibition, works by the artist will be presented by the gallery at this year’s Art Cologne.
