Chiharu Shiota, During Sleep, 2005, Museum Moderner Kunst Karnten, Klagenfurt, Austria. |
Caught in a Nocturnal Web in the Midst of Realities of Our Own Making |
Chiharu Shiota, Zweite Haut, Installation view, Sammlung Hoffmann/Hoffmann Collection, Berlin, Sophie-Gips-Hofe, Berlin, 2001.
Chiharu Shiota, Untitled, 2005, Oil paint stick on paper, 7 x 9.5".
Chiharu Shiota, Dialogue from DNA, Centre of Japanese Art and Technology, Krakow, Poland, 2004. |
Goff + Rosenthal In performances and installations she is preoccupied with remembrance and oblivion. Earth and water recall the lasting and the fleeting. There is a concern with drifting between the cultures of Asia and Europe as also with a farewell to childhood. In 1999 she created the installation Dreaming Time: From the framework of a house, whose roof and walls were made partly of crossed chopsticks, a bid to escape was made by an army of shoes, all of which were tied with red threads to the middle of the house and hence kept within a certain radius, yet not a single shoe pointed inwards. The worst of it was that every shoe had lost its partner and had to make its way in the world alone. From Japan Chiharu Shiota brought a chest of old toys and buried it. She later unearthed the dolls and cuddly animals and tied them with cords to the floor and walls. The work was called Bondage, recalling rites of exorcism to counter loss of protection within the family. 'Maybe I am unable without fretting to create more art, and if I am unable to create more art, I become more fretful,' so she once wrote. But just as a story-teller keeps the spooks of the night at a distance, she bans fear from her works. In her installations she has wound herself in black woollen threads like in a cocoon. In her exhibitions she has slept between a bed and the surrounding walls among these threads forming an impenetrable thicket. The spatial complex of black lines was both threatening and comforting and offered protection and stability. But the lines also created labyrinthine structures, calling at every point for new decisions. Anxiety at the end of childhood was just as much woven into them as were metaphors for a technology giving contemporary life its contours. Electronic webs, neural channels, personal relationships: From all sides folk nowadays are called upon to be flexible. A photo shows the cut threads of an early installation. Nothing more remains when the spooks have been taken down. Chiharu Shiota makes neither drawings nor notes in advance, for fear of losing her inner images. In Berlin, where she has been living since 1999, she has no atelier and works only on location. A strange thrift, which accepts only the fleeting. Biographical and cultural transformations come into contact in her works. 'Memories can't be rinsed away', she claims. She translates resistance to the flow of time into poetical and memorable images. In the installation Under the Skin eight items of clothing hang above a washing basin and reach nearly to the ceiling. They hold each others' arms like eight sisters from a fairytale with an adventure to undergo. Soil clings to, and water drips from the items. They have already come a long way, and smears and smudges bear witness to their experiences. Chiharu Shiota was born in Osaka in 1972 and began her studies in Kyoto. She began with painting, but at present paints only ''in the air' with her threads. An exchange-semester took her to Canberra in Australia, then she came in 1996 to Germany, where she studied under performance artists Marina Abramovic and Rebecca Horn, who encouraged her in her way of working with perceptions of the body and its experiences in space. In Germany she gained recognition already as an art-student through taking part in group and solo exhibitions, leading her within two years from the fringe to the centre. Exhibitions in the Ludwig-Forum in Aachen, the House of World Cultures in Berlin and the Queensland Art Museum in New York, as also her taking part in the Triennial of Modern Art in Yokohama, have put her on the best path to international recognition. 'What's under my feet, what I eat, whom I meet — all that influences my art', says Chiharu Shiota, who after four and a half years in Germany is gradually feeling surer of 'putting out roots and leaves' in Berlin. But despite the meteoric rise of her career, she has the feeling that her surroundings are changing even faster. The resulting discrepancies provide her with even more material for her evolution. Chiharu Shiota (b. Osaka, 1972) lives in Berlin. — Katrin Bettina Müller
Chiharu Shiota, Trauma/Alltag (Letter), 2008, Steel, wool thread, paper, 40 x 20 x 20 cm, Goff+Rosenthal, Berlin. |
Chiharu Shiota, Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, Germany, Installation View. |
Chiharu Shiota, Installation view (detail), 2008. |
Inside, Outside: Bound in Tension and Suspension |
Shiota Chiharu, Untitled (No. 25), 2007, Oil paint stick on paper, 17 x 17 inches framed.
Shiota Chiharu, n. t., performance photograph, iceland (2001),.Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art Kagawa, Japan, photo: Sunhi Mang, © Chiharu Shiota. |
Goff+Rosenthal Born in 1972 in Osaka, Japan, Shiota graduated from Kyoto Seika University before spending time in Australia and then settling in Germany where she studied under Marina Abramovic at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste and Rebecca Horn at the Universität der Künste, Berlin. Beginning her career as a painter, Shiota works today mainly in installation and performance art. Using a finely honed artistic vocabulary, Shiota integrates a diverse range of influences ranging from the sophistication of Japanese textile processing, the expressiveness of Far Eastern calligraphy, Eva Hesse’s woven nets of string, Sol LeWitt’s structures and wall drawings, Christo’s wrappings, Janine Antoni’s performances and Ana Mendieta’s body-related works into a wholly personal and visually intense experience. Through ritualistic and obsessive contemplation, Shiota’s work attempts to arrest time and to meld reality with the subconscious. For this exhibition, Chiharu binds the gallery in a tangle of burnt chairs and black wool thread creating a space of palpable tension and suspension, both physical and psychological. Shiota literally spins her worldview into an amalgamation of transcultural experiences where her feeling of troubled homelessness intertwines with a strong sense of integration with the situation around her. Shiota has a deep awareness that where she belongs is sometimes clearer in memory and by binding the gallery into a tangled snare of recollection she weaves a net of safety, security, love and home that is deeply personal. This sense of security is fleeting however and one discovers that the installation is embedded with the nightmarish sense that it is at once fleeting, impenetrable, imprisoning and misleading. It seems to me that there is no way back, no matter where I go…The threads are interwoven into each other. Get entangled. Torn apart. And disentangle themselves. Referencing an incident in her childhood where a neighbor’s home burned to the ground, Shiota uses the burnt chairs to explore how an object becomes stronger and more beautiful through its loss of function; through its apparent death. Within this violent impact of destruction lies a poetic and tranquil awareness of how the past informs the present, where the invisible does not necessarily mean absence, and where we are led into the inevitable future. It is here that the relationship between one’s self and the outside world, loneliness and frustration, death and life reside and where we, alongside Shiota, all remain waiting. Shiota’s work was included in several important exhibitions in the past eighteen months including, Tokyo-Berlin/Berlin-Tokyo at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Fiction for the Real at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Body at the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum for Contemporary Art in Kagawa, Japan and Asian Waves at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany. This coming summer Shiota will have a solo exhibition of her work at The National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan with an accompanying full hardcover catalogue. Shiota is the recipient of several important awards and her work is included in numerous public and private international collections including those of the Sammlung Hoffman Berlin and the Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg, Germany. She has also exhibited in group exhibitions at P.S.1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the Queens Museum of Art and many others. Shiota lives in Berlin. |
Shiota Chiharu, Trauma/Alltag (Mirrors), 2007, Steel, wool thread, broken mirrors, 100 x 100 x 35 cm. |
