PRESENTATION: Chiharu Shiota-Everyone, a Universe

Chiharu Shiota’s inspiration often emerges from a personal experience or emotion which she expands into universal human concerns such as life, death and relationships. She has redefined the concept of memory and consciousness by collecting ordinary objects such as shoes, keys, beds, chairs and dresses, and engulfing them in immense thread structures. She explores this sensation of a ‘presence in the absence’ with her installations, but also presents intangible emotions in her sculptures, drawings, performance videos, photographs and canvases.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Fundació Antoni Tàpies Archive

The work of Chiharu Shiota breathes a universality that appeals to the hearts and minds of people of different generations and from distant geographical locations, the massive scale of her works inviting the viewer to be part of this immersive experience. The artist succeeds in making presence evident in absence, like life and death. She is inspired by memory, trauma and uncertainty; concerns that are shared by all humans. Chiharu Shiota’s Solo exhibition “Everyone, a Universe”, includes two installations, two works on paper and five sculptures that allow us to discover the connections between Shiota’s work and that of Antoni Tàpies. For the artist, the red threads symbolize the micro-universe made up of blood and blood vessels that circulate through our bodies and, in its most literal sense, also make visible the mutual connections that bind humanity. In Shiota’s work, the macrocosm and the microcosm are unified, so that, almost naturally, we perceive that there is an intervening force seeking to preserve the sense of order and balance. In her work, various contrasting dualisms are presented – life and death, dream and reality, inside and outside –, which, in turn, is also an attempt to find intermediate zones. Shiota’s search for fundamental truths gives rise to a certain universality that cuts through to the deepest layers of the subconscious. “I realized that for humans, dying is not just a matter of the mind expiring: it is the whole body that dies. Physics tends to deny the existence of the soul, but in accepting my own death, I felt that the soul exists. If the human body is made of atoms, these must not disappear… if the soul (consciousness) endures, even after death, what is the nature of the world and the universe we inhabit?” Shiota’s universe is indebted not only to her own life experiences, but also to the work of the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, the Japanese Muraoka Saburo, and the Cuban Ana Mendieta, whom Shiota discovered in Japan and who has inspired the artist from the beginning of her career. The artist and Antoni Tàpies share the ability to pose questions about the human condition through their work and through the use of common, everyday objects. Furthermore, both artists suffered a serious illness, and death appears as a recurring theme in their artistic careers. The work of the two creators also shows an interest in the concept of the wall, either as a border, as a limitation or as a witness to the past. While Tàpies explains in his writings that the dramatic situation suffered by adults and all the cruel fantasies of his time were drawn and seemed to be inscribed on the walls around him, Shiota, for her part, affirms through this project that to be alive means to endure suffering, and that this is part of our existence: “Death forms a part of my work. I view it not as an end, but rather as a new beginning. For me, death represents a new state of existence within the cycle of life. Death is a state that moves towards a larger universe”. Chiharu Shiota’s intervene in the spaces of the museum building with of an artistic installation that explores the place from which we speak and from which we talk to each other. A recognition of the space as the place where the work is born, produced and, in this case, ceases to exist. Chiharu Shiota was born in Japan and studied in Germany, where she has lived for over twenty-five years. Death has been one of her concerns from the beginning, given that the search for the meaning of existence is often equivalent to the search around death and its denial. In 2005, when she became ill with cancer and faced the possibility of death, her awareness of what lies beyond personal disappearance became a major concern. “I came to the conclusion that living and dying actually belong to the same dimension”, she wrote to Mami Kataoka in 2019. “With death in front of me, I realized that there was a world shared by the universe that I had inside me and the outer universe. So it occurred to me eventually that my body was closer to that universe. When our time is up, we may dissolve completely into that universe. Perhaps death is not a return to nothing but, rather, a matter of integrating ourselves, beyond the extinction of life, into death, into a fusion with something bigger than ourselves. This is how I began to incorporate death into my work: death not as an end, but as something equivalent to life”. Since her fight against the disease, Shiota has included body parts in her work, revealing the feeling of presence in absence through intermediary objects such as beds, chairs and shoes. In a text about the project she is presenting at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Shiota writes: “The objects in my installations always represent the existence of an individual. When I look at the chairs, I see people sitting next to each other, but each one is a universe unto themself.”

Photo: Chiharu Shiota. Everyone, a Universe, 2024. Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona. Photo: Pep Herrero © VEGAP and the Artist, 2024

Info: Curator: Imma Prieto, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Carrer d’Aragó 255, Barcelona, Spain, Duration: 22/3-23/6/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, Sun 10:00-15:00, https://fundaciotapies.org/