The entanglement of the past, present and future is a pillar of Aboriginal culture in Australia. It is a worldview in which humans are not separate from the living world but participate in an ongoing continuum of relationships and responsibilities.

While rooted in a very different cultural tradition, two remarkable exhibitions by Berlin-based artists Julian Charrière and Julius von Bismarck unexpectedly echo this perspective by questioning the dualisms—nature and culture, human and non-human, past and future—that have long shaped Western thought.

Julius von Bismarck, This is not the storm, 2026, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.

Charrière’s Hardcore, at MONA in Hobart, opened on 5 June, while Bismarck’s This Is Not the Storm, at ACCA in Melbourne, closed on 14 June. Seen together during a journey across Australia, the two exhibitions felt like complementary chapters of the same reflection.

Among the leading artists of their generation, Charrière and Bismarck have developed practices at the intersection of ecology, anthropology and technology. Yet neither illustrates the climate crisis nor advocates simple solutions. Instead, they examine the contradictions that define our relationship with the living world, combining scientific inquiry with myth, physical experimentation with poetic imagination, and a profound sense of wonder before nature’s power and permanence.

Julian Charrière, Veins, 2026. Installation view at Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Hobart, Australia.

Both artists begin with deceptively simple gestures. In Punishment (2012), Bismarck lashes the sea with a whip. The act is ridiculous, yet immediately recognisable: it embodies humanity’s persistent fantasy that nature can be disciplined, controlled or subdued.

Charrière’s Buried Sunshines Burn (2024) proposes a radically different gesture. Attempting to melt an iceberg with a gas torch fuelled by fossil energy is equally futile, but it no longer expresses domination. Instead, it acknowledges the urgency of acting, however modestly, while exposing a painful paradox: even our attempts to repair environmental damage remain entangled with the fossil-fuel economy that produced it. If Bismarck stages the illusion of mastery, Charrière reveals the impossibility of innocence.

Julian Charrière, Buried Sunshines Burn | 5G1.6N8, 2024.

This reflection extends into Spiral Economy, where Charrière transforms a vending machine into a dispenser of fossils. The gesture is witty, yet quietly devastating. Fossils—material witnesses to deep geological time—become impulse purchases, mirroring the way fossil fuels, born of similarly immense temporal processes, have been extracted, consumed and squandered. In both cases, what took millions of years to form is reduced to the logic of instant gratification. Few works express so succinctly the collision between deep time and the short-termism of contemporary capitalism.

The works of both artists capture something distinctive about our historical moment. We are the first species capable of altering planetary systems on a geological scale, yet we continue to respond through gestures that are simultaneously heroic, absurd, necessary and insufficient.

Julian Charrière, Spiral Economy, 2025.

They also confront viewers with forces that exceed ordinary human experience. In Towards No Earthly Pole, Charrière reveals the immensity of the Arctic night, while The Storm immerses us in the violence of a hurricane overwhelming an urban landscape. These works recalibrate our sense of scale, reminding us that human history unfolds within temporalities and forces far greater than ourselves.

Julius von Bismarck, and Julian Charrière, Grand Staircase Escalante, We Must Ask You to Leave (mountain view drive), 2018, Courtesy the artists © The artists; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023.

Questions of resilience and transformation recur throughout both exhibitions. Charrière cryogenises a plant, feeds snails with the calcium of classical marble sculptures, and in Breathe invites visitors to inhale air released from ancient ore formed when oxygen first accumulated in Earth’s atmosphere some 2.4 billion years ago.

Bismarck places a tumbleweed on a treadmill and sets marble heads into perpetual motion, where collisions slowly produce fragments rather than conclusions. Geological time, biological persistence and human history become inseparable.

Technology, too, occupies an intentionally ambiguous position. Helicopters animate alpine forests. Drones record controlled fires. Sophisticated engineering enables many of Charrière’s installations. Rather than distancing themselves from the technological systems implicated in ecological destruction, both artists deliberately work through them. They refuse the comfort of moral purity, making contradiction itself their material.

Julius von Bismarck, Geh aus mein Herz! (Go forth, my heart!) Swiss Alps 2023, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2026. Courtesy the artist; alexander levy, Berlin; Sies + Hoke, Dusseldorf; Esther Schipper, Berlin, Paris, Seoul. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.

This is what makes these exhibitions so important today. Charrière and Bismarck are not climate activists disguised as artists; they are agents provocateurs. They resist certainty, exposing instead the ambiguities of an age in which humanity has become a planetary force without fully understanding what that means. Rather than asking us to love nature more, they ask us to reconsider what it means to belong to it. In doing so, they move the conversation beyond environmental awareness towards a deeper reflection on coexistence, responsibility and the place of humans within the living world.

By Frédéric de Goldschmidt