Second Suns

by Julian Charrière (Artist), David Breskin (Contributor), Ele Carpenter (Contributor)

French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière’s (born 1987) work in Second Suns investigates the postnuclear landscapes and architecture of the Bikini Atoll and Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan―respectively American and Soviet nuclear testing sites. This investigation comprises photographs, sculpture and video works, as well as expedition documentation.

288 pages, Paperback

Published February 19, 2019

Reviews

[Jackie Ess · Rating 5 out of 5]

A box set, two books, one dark, one light, Semipalatinsk and Bikini Atoll, two nuclear test sites at opposite ends of the world. Film photographs of sublime scenery, crowded by strange lights, an artifact of the enduring radioactivity of the sites. It's often remarked that the atomic bomb and LSD appeared on the scene within a year of one another. Here then, are the hallucinations. There are also essays, poems, interviews. Sometimes we veer into art talk --- rhetorical gravity and deep time become an epistemological standard, perhaps we shouldn't be so convinced. But let's keep listening.

I found this after reading the much easier-to-find "As We Used to Float" and strongly recommend Nadim Samman's presentation of that project, linked here:

https://vimeo.com/408345402