More than 2bn years ago, during the Paleoproterozoic era, the Earth’s atmosphere began to fill with free oxygen, enabling the rise of aerobic life and, ultimately, humans. It’s known as the Great Oxidation Event, and deep in the subterranean belly of the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Tasmania, a new artwork offers visitors the chance to inhale oxygen that’s been trapped in iron ore since then.

When French-Swiss conceptual artist Julian Charrière came up with the idea, Mona’s owner David Walsh not only said yes but created a bespoke space for it.

“I want people to get all the way back to the beginning of the earth,” Charrière tells the Guardian at the media call on Friday. “It’s like a time machine.”

He has sourced ancient iron ore from Australia’s Pilbara region, which is put through machinery in an on-site lab each day to have water extracted. The water is then put through a Hofmann apparatus – a piece of scientific equipment that electrolyses water – to pull oxygen out. That oxygen is then released into the room to be breathed in by visitors for the very first time, connecting each person “to the beginning of life on earth”.

Breathe is designed as a solitary experience.

One by one, visitors are given access to a vault-like corridor reminiscent of a huge mining drift. Walking through the tunnel, flanked by raw sandstone and lined with deep red rocks from the Pilbara, you can pause to peek into a side room with the aforementioned lab.

The temperature drops with each step as the tunnel opens into a high-ceilinged cylindrical room, like an underground windowless tower, with the lighting dependent on the amount of sun that can be reflected through a small opening above (so, in Tasmanian winter, pretty dim).

Walking over tiles made of polished ancient tiger ore, you’ll circle another cylinder: a floor-to-ceiling clear glass tube that houses the Hofmann apparatus.

Sit in front, and you’ll see a small opening. Here is your closest access to Charrière’s pure, ancient oxygen.

In inhaling, “you are connected to the beginning of life on Earth but you are also – and that is the crazy thing about this space – you are also the first person to inhale that oxygen,” he says.

“You are breathing something which is so pure and has not been touched by any being before you … And the beauty of the piece is you will carry it until you die.

“You’re going to become a small part of this installation and you become a big part of the great oxygen cycle, and you will only finally free this oxygen once ….” He pauses: “Once you’re going in the other world.” He means: once you die.

Breathe, a permanent installation, is opening alongside Charriere’s major new exhibition Hard Core, which showcases both the ambition and the scientific curiosity of the Berlin-based artist.

Individual elements of Hard Core have been exhibited elsewhere in the world, including at the Venice Biennale, but it’s difficult to imagine the full show sitting anywhere other than underground at Mona, with its exposed rock, its mix of the industrial with the elemental, and its fusion of science with art. “We decided to really focus on works that relate to geology in some way,” the artist says.

In Blue Fossil Entropic Stories (2013), a series of photos depicts Charrière standing on and dwarfed by an Icelandic iceberg, making his mark with a blowtorch.

In Not all Who Wander Are Lost, glacial rocks take up parts of the room. They have been drilled into, with the removed columns lined up along the floor. In Nobodies Dreams Survives, living snails slowly eat away at a calcium carbonate sculpture. In Atlas, a beautiful large rotating marble is mechanically polished, and will slowly erode over the timeline of the exhibition. Controlled Burn is a hypnotic film of imploding fireworks, shot at sites in Germany, Belgium and the North Sea.

The show then takes you through a mirrored room of more rock, reflection and strobe-like light, before you cocoon yourself within a dark carpeted space where you can lie down and absorb the livestreamed rumblings of an active volcano.

Parts of Hard Core evoke previous Mona shows: Theo Merciere’s Mirrorscape, or perhaps more obviously Jonsi’s Hrafntinna (Obsidian) – although Charrière’s volcano immersion is more meditative. As a whole, it takes you on an epic trip through deep time and deep Earth, examining our relationship to the planet.

“Each sculpture, each installation, each work is trying to bring deep time into the realm of human experience. That’s basically the ‘hard core’ of this show,” Charrière says. “You can actually sense what is normally [beyond] what our senses are able to grasp.”