Chiharu Shiota - In the beginning was...

Heir to Ana Mendieta and a whole generation of feminist artists of the early 1970s, most of her installations are collections of used belongings, full of memories, which serve as expressions of human acts. Thus, complex networks of threads weave around and between them.

Shiota studied painting at the Kyoto Seika University, in Japan. Her stay at the Canberra School of Art in 1994 is particularly fascinating to understand her work. This was when she began to replace traditional pictorial technique with her thread installations, which represent a sort of drawing in the air, as the artist herself has described it on occasion. She moved to Germany in 1996 and continued her studies in Braunschweig and later in Berlin, where she lives and works to this day.

The artist has taken part in biennials in Moscow, Honolulu, Lyon and Venice where she produced the Japanese Pavilion for its 56th edition, which became one of her most outstanding works. This work, The Key In The Hand, comprised 55,000 used keys suspended on red threads, symbolising the lost aspects of people. For the 20th Sydney Biennial in 2016, Shiota created Conscious Sleep, an installation of vertical beds entwined in black thread to remind us of prisoners who had slept in the colonial prison in a sandstone building on Cockatoo Island.

Shiota took over the entire museum space, creating poignant atmospheres that represent the territory between the artist’s inner and outer world and created participatory pieces in collaboration with citizens of Lleida and also with the Sorigué team.