Chiharu Shiota

In Silence. CentrePasquArt, Biel Bienne, Switzerland



During Sleep. 2005. Museum Moderner Kunst Karnten, Klagenfurt, Austria



Chiharu Shiota. Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, Germany, Installation View

After the dream & A long day

In Silence. CentrePasquArt, Biel Bienne, Switzerland


Japanese artist CHIHARU SHIOTA creates spatial installations that engenders an ambivalent feeling in the viewer between fascination and irritation. CHIHARU has spun an everyday table, chair and books spread over table and ground into a filigree cocoon of black wool yarn that-from ceiling to floor, from wall to wall-makes a thousand links with their surroundings visible; as it were, a network that connects the thing-world with the immaterial. Like an insect caught in a web or suspended in a protective shroud-viewers settle on different associations according to their standpoint.

PETER FISCHER characterizes the work of CHIHARU SHIOTA as a movement between extremes, as “on the one hand, in her installations she creates a world of her own, a world delineated as a spatial entity divorced from external reality […] and on the other, the installations are metaphors for the web of nightmares wherein she is ensnared. The network of cotton threads traps her in her sleep like a spider’s web in which she is hopelessly entangled, nervously woven into it, without an Ariadne’s thread to extricate her."

CHIHARU SHIOTA lives in Berlin.