Exhibition: Midnight Zone, Museum Tinguely, Basel, 2025

Midnight Zone
Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland, 2025

11 June – 2 November 2025
Curated by Roland Wetzel

The exhibition Midnight Zone invites visitors to think and feel with water, not as a surface, but as a substance. The exhibition unfolds as an immersive reflection on fluid worlds, transforming a space into a world one can sink into and move within, becoming porous to its pressures, its depths, and its dreams.

Bringing together earlier works with major new commissions, the exhibition traces a long-standing exploration of environmental thresholds. Unfolding over three floors, its title refers to the bathypelagic zone of the ocean, where sunlight vanishes and vision fades. In the works shown, the sea is allowed to speak, pulse, and breathe through image, sound, and elemental choreography.

Among the new works is the 2024 film Midnight Zone, which uses a sinking Fresnel lighthouse lens to turn viewers into participants entangled in a choreography of light and life. A central sculpture, also titled Midnight Zone, features the repurposed Fresnel lens from the film in an installation that translates sound pollution recordings into physical vibrations. In a different room, visitors are invited to gaze at the ceiling as the 2025 film Albedo renders melting glaciers as towering, celestial bodies. This work, which acts as a diptych with the earlier 2019 film Towards No Earthly Pole (also featured in the exhibition), sheds new light on climate catastrophe by contrasting a daytime reality with an uncanny nighttime vision. The result is not representation, but resonance—a state of atmospheric intimacy and an invitation to see through the currents.

Midnight Zone is co-produced by Museum Tinguely and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. A new version is slated to resurface in Wolfsburg in 2026.

All works by Julian Charrière. All images are © The artist / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photos by Jens Ziehe. Video by Johannes Förster.