ART CITIES:Berlin-Chiharu Shiota

Chiharu Shiota is a Japanese Performance and Installation artist best known for creating room-filling, monumental, delicate and poetic environments. Central to the artist’s work are the themes of remembrance and oblivion, dreaming and sleeping, traces of the past and childhood, and dealing with anxieties. Chiharu Shiota in her installations often employs the use of everyday objects , within her work to explore the relationship between living and dying and to access memories found within these objects.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Blain|Southern Archive

Chiharu Shiota created “Uncertain Journey” a new site-specific monumental installation at Blain|Southern Gallery in Berlin. Shiota is primarily known for her immersive installations, such as “The Key in the Hand” (with more than 50,000 keys hanging from a cloud of tightly interwoven string), with which she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Weaving intricate networks of yarn, the artist creates new visual planes as if she were painting in mid-air.  The installation fills the central space of the Gallery with dense webs of red yarn that seemingly grow from the ceiling and surrounding walls. stretching throughout the volume, the complex mesh labyrinth reaches down towards a series of hollow, sculptural boat hulls that rest on the floor of the gallery. the blood red color of the yarn is laden with symbolism, alluding to the interior of the body, while the thin thread strands refer to the neural connections in the brain. the boat skeletons, enclosed by the vibrant canopy overhead, intend to raise existential questions of fate and belonging, evoking musings that can be as complex as the tangled yarn itself. The gallery’s second floor mezzanine offers an alternative perspective, a bird’s eye view, several steps removed from the psychological weight of the entanglement below. On this floor two dimensional thread-on-canvas works further explore the ideas used in the main space. Shiota studied painting early in her education but restricted by the use of canvas and paint, she proceeded to push against the definitions of the medium. At first using her own body in performance pieces, she later began to use thread as a mode for formal and conceptual expression; it allowed her to remove her physical presence yet still address the corporeal ideas that are central to her practice. Her canvases can be viewed as this journey coming full circle.

Info: Blain|Southern Gallery, Potsdamer Straße 77–87, Berlin, Duration: 17/9-12/11/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.blainsouthern.com