by Jayne Wilkinson // Dec. 10, 2024
Moving through what she calls the “deepest layers of the soul,” Chiharu Shiota approaches her work like a personal excavation, drawing upon various life experiences of pain, longing, joy or grief to build an emotionally resonant practice.
Chiharu Shiota: ‘The Unsettled Soul,’ installation view // © Vojtěch Veškrna, courtesy of Kunsthalle Praha
For ‘The Unsettled Soul,’ the first solo presentation of Shiota’s work in the Czech Republic, Kunsthalle Praha presents four room-sized installations, including two immersive works with wall-to-wall thread and a selection of photographs, videos and performance documentation from as early as 1994. Shiota has exhibited many variations of her all-encompassing string- and thread-based installations, including in 2015 when she showed ‘The Key in the Hand’ for the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The scale of these works is staggering. Over the nine-day installation period, 30 people were required to lift, tie and weave together the dense clouds of connecting threads. The exhibition’s curator, Christelle Havranek, estimated that, if laid out end to end, the length of thread used would stretch over 400 kilometres. At their most wondrous, they produce an almost fairy-tale quality, like walking in a dream where objects emerge or hover just beyond vision. This blurry effect is most impressive in ‘Crossing Paths with Fate’ (2024), where four plywood boats are suspended within a forest of hanging red nylon, seeming to appear and recede as one moves through the swaying cords.
Chiharu Shiota: ‘The Unsettled Soul,’ installation view // © Vojtěch Veškrna, courtesy of Kunsthalle Praha
As has become her signature, Shiota incorporates symbolic objects into each installation. In ‘Silent Concert’ (2024), the central focus is a burnt piano (a reference to the childhood trauma of witnessing her neighbours’ house fire), enveloped in tightly stretched black thread woven in radial webs throughout the space; in ‘The Heart in Your Home’ (2024), the inverse applies, where the recognizable shape of a “house”—a triangle atop a rectangle, which here mimics the gallery’s pitched roof—is elongated, exaggerated and filled with tangles of bright red thread, suggesting both the chaos of domestic space and that the home might act as a fortress against the outside world.
Chiharu Shiota: ‘The Unsettled Soul,’ installation view // © Vojtěch Veškrna, courtesy of Kunsthalle Praha
Shiota studied under Rebecca Horn and Marina Abramovic, whose influences are both recognizable—Horn in the blending of sculpture and performance, Abramovic in earlier durational performances—and extend conceptually to Shiota’s belief in art’s capacity to mobilize empathy or compassion. Shiota also counts Ana Mendieta as an influence, and the ‘Siluetas’ (1973–78) are a clear reference point for Shiota’s ‘Try and Go Home’ (1997), a series of photographic self-portraits of her performing in an earthen landscape.
Chiharu Shiota: ‘The Unsettled Soul,’ installation view // © Vojtěch Veškrna, courtesy of Kunsthalle Praha
One senses a deep spiritualism here, rooted in idealism and the desire to find creative release for the emotional range of human experience and relationships. But approaching work that strives for a sense of shared humanism in a political moment that is so violently divided and autocratic is challenging. The transformative possibilities of materials and the repetition of broad archetypes (house/home, boat/transportation, blood/body) seem intended to elicit expressive responses, but the generalizing approach to issues of migration and belonging especially leaves an open question around the political stakes of such charged symbolism. For me, the most affecting work was a series of three small drawings, ‘Connected to the Universe’ (2024), made of delicate yarn hand-stitched on canvas, repeating the chaotic but precise linear forms of the larger thread works. They read almost as sketches for ideas yet to come and convey something of the imaginative possibilities of abstraction, unattached as they are to the more familiar objects present elsewhere.
Exhibition Info
Kunsthalle Praha
Chiharu Shiota: ‘The Unsettled Soul’
Exhibition: Nov. 28, 2024-Apr. 28, 2025
kunsthallepraha.org
Klárov 5, Malá Strana 118 00, 1 Praha 1, Czechia, click here for map
