Chi­haru Shio­ta | The Unset­tled Soul | Kun­sthalle Pra­ha | Dazed

Around 400 kilo­me­tres of thread were used to cre­ate the mon­u­men­tal instal­la­tions in Chi­haru Shiota’s new solo show, The Unset­tled Soul, at Kun­sthalle Pra­ha. That’s enough, laid end-to-end, to link the Prague gallery with the artist’s home in Berlin. ​“We only realised this at the end [of the instal­la­tion],” says chief cura­tor Chris­telle Havranek. ​“It wasn’t on pur­pose.” But maybe it wasn’t com­plete­ly by mis­take, either. Chi­haru, she says, doesn’t believe in coincidences.

In one room of The Unset­tled Soul, Shiota’s red threads are pulled taut to form the walls of a tow­er­ing house, con­form­ing to the Kun­sthalle archi­tec­ture. In anoth­er, they cre­ate a watery illu­sion; thou­sands of red strands hang down from the ceil­ing, and as a vis­i­tor you walk beneath them, sunken boats sus­pend­ed over your head. (“What a night­mare to pack away,” anoth­er vis­i­tor says. ​“Imag­ine being the assis­tant who has to untan­gle all of that.”) A third space is criss-crossed with black twine, like a spider’s web, engulf­ing a burnt-out piano.

Being inside such a large, many-lay­ered instal­la­tion can be a dis­ori­en­tat­ing expe­ri­ence, but Shio­ta is well aware of the pow­er that lies in play­ing with the sens­es. After grad­u­at­ing from uni­ver­si­ty in Japan in 1996, she stud­ied under artists includ­ing Maria Abro­mav­ic and Rebec­ca Horn, hav­ing estab­lished her own art prac­tice with per­for­mances like ​“Becom­ing Paint­ing” (1994), which saw her cov­er her­self in red enam­el paint – a tox­ic sub­stance that burned her skin and stained her hair for months after. Sub­se­quent art­works involved long peri­ods of fast­ing and gal­lons of ​‘blood’; the colour red returns time and time again, used to sym­bol­ise fam­i­ly, the human body, and the lived expe­ri­ences of women.

Shiota’s own per­son­al expe­ri­ence is inte­gral to many works on show. The destroyed piano is lift­ed from a mem­o­ry of her neighbour’s house burn­ing down when she was nine years old – lat­er, a charred piano remained in the ash­es, silent and dys­func­tion­al, but retain­ing a sense of its beau­ty. Oth­er links are more contemporary.

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