Midnight Zone & Scream Machines

Written by Joas Nebe

Julian Charrière: Midnight Zone

11 June - 2 November 2025

Museum Tingluely

Paul Sacher-Anlage 1

4058 Basel

Opening hours:

Tuesday - Sunday 11am - 6pm

Thursday 11am - 9pm

Monday closed

Julian Charrière is a student of Olafur Eliasson, an institute based in Berlin that originates from Iceland and is now a globally active center for art research.

Unlike his student Julian Charrière, Olafur Eliasson mostly manages not to get lost in illustrations of scientific findings. Otherwise, his widely recognized art would be meaningless, at least in terms of what contemporary art is willing and able to deliver. On the contrary, his student, the Swiss-French Julian Charrière, has not sufficiently distanced himself from his role model despite receiving the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize in 2024.

Especially in the exhibition Midnight Zone, Charrière tends to get too caught up in illustrative positions dictated by politics and foundations to communicate the impacts of climate change.

To start with a successful example, in Spiral Economy (2025), Charrière presents a conventional snack box in which (supposedly) fossils can be purchased by inserting a coin. Fossils, as well as many other artifacts targeted by the exhibition, have formed over millions of years and can now be bought on the open market. In this way, Spiral Economy serves as a wonderful metaphor for the consumption of what we, in our very short lives, do to our environment compared to the formation of fossils, deep-sea creatures, etc.

It is also interesting to note the documentation using a deep-sea robot of the persistent existence of trash on the ocean floor at depths of over 1,000 meters, where no daylight penetrates, which could potentially have a degrading effect on the plastic remnants of our civilization—(The Gods Must Be Crazy, 2019, multi-channel installation).

Another illustrative piece is Black Smoker (2019), named after underwater volcanoes located in depths unreachable for human diving, which are eyed with great interest by large resource companies due to the lack of deep-sea protection in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. In Black Smoker, Charrière invites us to take off our shoes and experience the eruption sounds of the volcanoes both acoustically and tactilely.

An important contribution, rightly awarded the Schmidt Foundation Environmental Prize.

Credit: courtesy of Museum Tingluely, Joas Nebe

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Written by Joas Nebe

Scream Machines

Kunst-Geisterbahn (Art Haunted House)

From Rebecca Moss and Augustin Rebetez

22 May - 30 August 2025

Museum Tingluely

Paul Sacher-Anlage 1

4058 Basel

Opening hours:

Tuesday - Sunday 11am - 6pm

Thursday 11am - 9pm

Monday closed

The Tinguely Museum, dedicated to the eponymous inventor of machine art—a brilliant Swiss who paid an immortal tribute to the machine age with crashing, rattling, stinking, self-dismantling machines—is located within a spacious park. In this park, just behind the fountain designed by Tinguely, the artists Rebecca Moss and Augustin Rebetez have created an art haunted house inside a black tent.

The art haunted house is a temporary artwork that will be dismantled after the end of the exhibition Scream Machines on August 30th and will disappear forever from the earth. Just as Tinguely paid an immortal tribute to the machine age, the two artists, in the era of digital horror, have created a monument to the tangible physical terror of fairgrounds from the 19th and 20th centuries. However, it’s hard to really call it a monument, given that the project will be gone in less than a quarter of a year.

The spook, which comes across as quite old-fashioned, features plastic skulls blowing in the passing carts in plastic tubes, barely missing visitors’ faces, cobwebs hanging from the ceiling brushing hair in the dark, or screaming ghosts whose mechanical operation is as obvious as the horror setup itself.

Like Tinguely, whose 100th birthday is celebrated this year by the privately operated museum run by Roche, the spook—though not really a spook—reminds our ears, spoiled by Dolby surround systems and 3D sound in cinemas, and our minds, overwhelmed by the strategies of modern gaming technology on ever larger screens, of the past—of the long-gone era of pleasant chills in dark times, or not-so-dark times.

In any case, the British-Swiss collaboration of the two artists commissioned by the museum has resulted in an experience worth visiting, which can only be recommended.

Photo credit: courtesy of Museum Tinguely, Roche, Joas Nebe