‘The Soul Trembles’ highlights twenty-five years of Chiharu Shiota’s artistic practice. She’s renowned internationally for her transformative, large-scale installations constructed from millions of fine threads that cluster in space or form complex webs that spill from wall to floor to ceiling. Shiota’s beautiful and disquieting works express the intangible: memories, dreams, anxiety and silence.
Curated by Mami Kataoka, Director of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, ‘Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles’ is the largest solo exhibition of the artist’s work to date and centres on these seductive constructions, contextualising them with works on paper, sculpture and documentation of the artist’s performance and theatre practice.
Since the 1990s, Chiharu Shiota has developed an extensive performance and installation practice. Best known for her expansive, encompassing, room-scale installations of black, white or red threads, she attracted widespread public attention with her work from the Japanese pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
Born in Osaka in 1972, Shiota enrolled at Kyoto Seika University to study painting in 1992, but soon abandoned the medium in favour of performance. From 1993 to ’94 she undertook an exchange program at Canberra School of Art, just as installation art was finding its way into Australian museums and galleries, before relocating to Germany in 1996 to pursue further study. She has been based in Berlin since 1999.
Image: Chiharu Shiota, Japan b.1972 / Uncertain Journey 2016/2019 / Installation view: ‘Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles’, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2019 / Metal frame, red wool / © Chiharu Shiota / Photograph: Sunhi Mang / Photograph courtesy: Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
Exhibition organised by the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
