Julian Charrière brings the ocean to MOCA: «Deep End» opens in Los Angeles on 15 November

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles announced on 5 October the exhibition «Julian Charrière: Deep End» — the first museum solo exhibition in Los Angeles by the Franco-Swiss artist, which opens to the public on 15 November 2026 at MOCA Grand Avenue and runs until 6 June 2027, as the museum itself announces. The exhibition is one of the two inaugural Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize exhibitions, presented alongside «Quipu of Encounters: The Dream of Water» by Cecilia Vicuña.

From early photographs and sculptures to new immersive films and installations, «Deep End» reflects more than a decade of Charrière’s engagement with the aesthetic and political dimensions of the natural world — from rapid industrialisation and exploitation to pollution and climate resilience. The works explore the fragility and resilience of the planet’s water systems, viewing the sea not only as a carbon sink, a habitat or a chemical marker of climate change, but as a vast biogeological system in which we are embedded.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is the newly commissioned work «Hope Line» (2026) — a meditative installation that broadcasts live a coral reef near Port Antonio in Jamaica, badly hit by the 2023 bleaching after El Niño. Visitors can not only see and hear one of the planet’s most important and biodiverse habitats, but also send it their voices. The work extends the series «Calls for Action» (2024–…), created in collaboration with Art into Acres and Re:Wild, and opens the feasibility study for the «Reefwards» project — underwater land art intertwined with coral restoration and conservation, developed in dialogue with marine biologist Sebastian Schmidt-Roach and architect Phillipp Mecke.

The exhibition also brings the U.S. premiere of «Midnight Zone» (2024/2025), the film and installation that dives into the Pacific waters above the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, between Hawaii and Mexico — whose seabed is rich in polymetallic nodules targeted by deep-sea mining. A Fresnel lighthouse lens slowly descends into the sea, guiding viewers into the so-called “midnight zone” — too deep for sunlight, yet populated by fish, sharks and countless other sea creatures; in the gallery, a sculptural installation with the same lens will rotate inside a specially built structure, casting ghost light through the spaces.

«Deep End», organised by assistant curator Paula Kroll together with environment and sustainability strategist Kelsey Shell, is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue to be published in the spring of 2027, with essays by Kroll herself and by Elizabeth DeLoughrey of UCLA. The Schmidt Prize, funded by philanthropists Eric and Wendy Schmidt, is awarded every two years (2024–2030) and includes an unrestricted honorarium of $100,000 for the winners. Charrière, a Swiss-French artist based in Berlin who was born in 1987, has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as MONA in Tasmania, the Museo Correr in Venice and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and took part in the 2022 Venice Biennale.