Chiharu Shiota
Chiharu Shiota was born in 1972 in Osaka, Japan and is currently based in Berlin. She studied at the Kyoto Seika University in Kyoto (Japan) from 1992 to 1996, was an exchange student at The Australian National University School of Art in Canberra (Australia) in 1993-93, and a student at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig (Germany) from 1997 to 1999, and lastly at Universität der Künste Berlin (Germany) from 1999 to 2003.
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.
Chiharu Shiota is known for her site-specific installations in which she weaves enormous webs from black, white, or red yarn and turns entire galleries into labyrinthine environments. Her awe-inspiring works evoke ideas of anxiety, identity, loss, and memory. Shiota’s “The Key in the Hand” display at the 2015 Venice Biennale, where she represented her native Japan, featured more than 50,000 keys dangling from an expansive web of red thread that hovered above two wooden boats.
Other memorable works include Lost Words (2017), for which Shiota suspended thousands of ripped Bible pages in 100 different languages inside Berlin’s oldest church, and Counting Memories (2019), in which paper numbers adorned her clouds of dark thread. Shiota has exhibited across Australia and has exhibited her work at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, the More Art Museum, in Tokyo, and the SCAD Museum of Art, among other institutions.
Books:
Shiota Chiharu in Memory, published by Gana Art (Korean-English)
Chiharu Shiota Invisable Line, published by ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum (Danish-English)
Chiharu Shiota Circulating Memories, published by Mixed Bathing World Executive Committee (Japanese-English)
Carte Blanche A, Chiharu Shiota, published by Musée national des arts asiatiques-Guimet (French)
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