Hard Core features an assemblage of artworks—from sculpture and installation to film and photography—that bridge nature, science, history, industry and myth.

The exhibition transforms Mona’s touring galleries and spill out into the Void and newly excavated additions to the museum. It features sculptures made of coal, lava, molten computers, onyx and obsidian. Cored samples taken from glacial erratic boulders are repaired with steel, aluminium, brass and silver. A lump of stromatolite rock, hundreds of millions of years old, is slowly polished to a perfect sphere between lapidary rock grinders. There are plants preserved cryogenically, snails slurping the calcium carbonate from marble statues, and a vending machine full of fossilised ammonites.‍

In photographs and video installations, Charrière pits human action against ideas of nature’s grandeur and vulnerability. He transfigures human breath into diamond, for instance, by returning our expelled carbon to th rushing water of a glacier mill in North Greenland, and pilots drones through fireworks imploding over decommissioned oil rigs, open pit coal mines and other derelict sites of extractive industry.

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Curated by Jarrod Rawlins and Olivier Varenne.

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