The poetic work of Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota is presented at the Parisian Grand Palais until March 19, 2025 in an exhibition entitled “The Soul Trembles”.
Co-organized with the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, this exhibition is the most important ever devoted to the artist in France. World-renowned for her monumental installations, Chiharu Shiota, who was born in Osaka in 1972, has been producing installations of intertwined wool threads since the mid-1990s, creating graphically spectacular tangled installations.
From her first exhibitions, skin and the body have played a fundamental role in her work. During her first performances, Chiharu Shiota rolled naked in mud or painted herself with red lacquer, as if covered in blood. In 2001, she attracted attention at the Kanagawa International Triennial of Contemporary Art with giant dresses dipped in mud (“Memory of skin”) and hung, like empty skins left after a molt.
The body is also the immateriality of feelings. Much of Chiharu Shiota’s work focuses on connection and emotion. The threads express the complexity of human emotions, that of dreams, those of relationships between beings and those of the tissues, veins and nerves of the human body. Individually inoperative, these threads considered in networks embody life.
Everyday objects are wrapped in threads, symbolizing the links between the intimate and the universal.
She also explores the notions of temporality, movement, memory and dreams.
It takes ten long days to weave one of these clouds of thread, remade in situ for each exhibition, since it is a travelling exhibition. However, these immersive and expressive art works seem to spring up instantly before our eyes. In her own words, the artist has found a way to paint in three dimensions and to deploy her feelings in space.
“Uncertain Journey”. Large metal boats spring from 280 kilometers of red wool threads: it is dreamlike, astonishing and enchanting
“In silence”. Inspired by a fire she witnessed as a child, Chiharu Shiota invades the room with a complex network of 200 kilometers of sooty-black Alcantara (a soft and velvety artificial leather) threads. Like spider webs, they imprison a burnt piano and rows of empty chairs, vestiges of an abandoned recital hall. Unless they embody the repressed soul of these objects, the ghost of music tries to extract itself from an imposed silence
“Reflection of Space and Time”. Human skin is covered by other skins, like clothing and living space
“Inside-Outside” presents an installation made entirely of used window frames collected by the artist from construction sites in East Berlin
“Accumulation – Searching For The Destination”. The suitcase raises the question of what we take with us, of the memory of home, of affective memory and of exile.
“Accumulation – Searching For The Destination”
“Where Are We Going?”. Boats wrapped in white threads take on the appearance of angel wings. The white color stands out from the other installations, which are made of red and black threads, and symbolizes purity, the blank page of a new beginning
January 17, 2025
