TRIBUTE:Chiharu Shiota-The Soul Trembles
Chiharu Shiota’s inspiration often emerges from a personal experience or emotion that 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 (shoes, keys, beds, chairs and dresses) and engulfing them in immense thread structures. By bringing them back to life and giving them a second purpose, the artist prompts a reflection about the objects’ past owners.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MMFA Archive
“The Soul Trembles”, is the largest solo exhibition to date Chiharu Shiota. Covering over three decades of creative output and pays tribute to the poetic and sensitive work of this internationally renowned visual artist, lauded for her performances and immersive installations made with red, black or white thread. It goes back to the early days of the artist’s career in the 1990s, highlighting the main themes that have recurred throughout her work over the last thirty years. It brings together several installations that describe her evolution over time in such a way that the public will be able to grasp the very essence of her art by the scope and breadth of her creative production. The exhibition’s title, The Soul Trembles, refers to emotions that resist language yet profoundly shape our experience of the world. Through works that intertwine the personal and the universal, Shiota invites us to consider what remains in the wake of absence and loss, and how meaning is formed through memory, experience and encounter. At a moment when change is accelerating and social fabric is strained, Shiota’s work creates space for reflection on our shared humanity. Since the mid-1990s, Chiharu Shiota has been a major figure of international contemporary art. However, she stands apart for her singular visual language conveyed from the interlacing of thread and the symbolic weight of objects. The exhibition offers an intricate exploration of the artist’s inner world in a narrative woven together from eight monumental installations, sculptures, photographs, drawings, performance videos and archival documents of her theatre work. Chiharu Shiota’s immersive installations, occupy the large galleries of Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, are site-specific, shaped in response to the spaces they inhabit. Like drawing in space, she weaves and intertwines her webs by hand, in situ, in a performative, repetitive, and meditative process of creation. Reborn with each iteration, these works represent the impermanent nature of existence, a premise that guides Shiota’s sensibilities. As visitors walk up the stairs towards the exhibition, they are greeted by “Where Are We Going?” (2017/2026), an installation suspended from the ceiling composed of boats that are filled with sheets of white thread. A recurring theme in Shiota’s work, boats symbolize the journey of life, displacement, immigration and the search for belonging.
The exhibition begins with a chronology of Chiharu Shiota’s artistic career. Through paintings, documentary photographs of performances and installations, videos and drawings, this gallery traces the evolution of her production from its beginnings. The second gallery presents several bodies of work, including a deeply personal piece Shiota created in response to her second cancer diagnosis in 2017. Her emotional state is powerfully conveyed in “Out of My Body” (2019), a suspended installation composed of fishnet-cut red leather and bronze casts of her limbs arranged on the floor. With her disassembled body preserved as a material remnant of her existence, she hopes to leave behind a permanent trace, her memory destined to remain forever. Also in this gallery is “Connecting Small Memories” (2019/2026), a mixed-media installation comprising miniature objects that the artist collected over the years or purchased at flea markets in Berlin. By constructing a tiny world with these once-abandoned objects, many interlaced with red thread, Shiota alludes to the interconnectedness of the world at large.
Occupying the entire central gallery, the immersive and iconic installation “Uncertain Journey| (2016/2026) is composed of six metal boats set on the floor that invite visitors to navigate their own way through. Red thread sprouts a canopy of webs on parts of the gallery walls and on the ceiling. The fourth gallery hosts “Reflection of Space and Time” (2018), an upright, metallic structure housing mirrors and two floating white dresses veiled by black thread. This installation will be activated by the viewers; they will become part of the work as the mirrors reflect back their image. The last gallery contains “In Silence” (2002/2026), an immersive installation composed of black thread, a piano and chairs. This work was inspired by a childhood memory of a burned piano that was discarded outside Shiota’s neighbour’s home after a fire. She noted that while it had lost its sound and function, the instrument retained its beauty. Having often been confronted with the fragility of life, Shiota hopes to make us feel the trembling of her soul in order to remind us of our own vulnerability.
Photo: Installation view of Chiharu Shiota’s Connecting Small Memories (2019) in the exhibition Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2019. Collection of the artist. © Chiharu Shiota / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / CARCC Ottawa 2026. Photo Sunhi Mang. Photo courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
Info: Curators: Mami Kataoka and Iris Amizlev, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion 1380 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, QC, Canada, Duration: 26/9/2026-14/2/2027, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 10:00-17:00, Wed 10:00-21:00, www.mbam.qc.ca/
