Chiharu Shiota is primarily known for her immersive installations, such as The Key in the Hand, 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. For her current show “Uncertain Journey” at Blain|Southern, Berlin, she’s creating a new site-specific monumental installation.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE “Uncertain Journey” Chiharu Shiota, through 12 November, at Blain|Southern, Berlin blainsouthern.com

The show centres around one installation that dominates the gallery’s vast central atrium. Seemingly growing from above, a dense web of red yarn reaches down towards the skeletal hulls of boats which rest on the gallery floor below. The colour of blood, the nexus of yarn is laden with symbolism, for the artist it alludes to the interior of the body and the complex network of neural connections in the brain. Enclosed by the canopy overhead, the boat carcasses raise existential questions of fate and belonging, evoking ideas that can be as complex as the tangled yarn itself.

Moving up to the gallery’s second floor mezzanine an alternative perspective opens up to the visitor – taking a more distant view some steps away from the psychological weight of the entanglement below. On this floor in the Long Gallery, new 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. This approach allowed her to remove her physical presence yet still address the corporeal ideas that are central to her practice.

Her explorations of space, objects, material and scale continue with a series of new works where networks of yarn, thread and occasionally found objects, connect within frames reminiscent of scaled down buildings or doll’s houses. In addition Shiota has recently also been commissioned for set design and artistic direction for a number of opera and theatre projects including forthcoming productions at Theater Kiel of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” in October 2016 and Richard Wagner’s “Siegfried” in March 2017.