Chiharu Shiota lines space with an intricate network of cotton thread, pregnant with the ideas a knot, a loop, or taut tie represent. Her material musings are both direct and metaphorical suggesting the mystifying, though causal, connection between thought and action. In her first major exhibition with Anna Schwartz, the sleek gallery interior will be reimagined as a temporal zone marked by “the awakening of consciousness into silence”, and the way that objects can hold fleeting traces of moments, before they are swallowed by the past.
From inside Shiota’s complex webs – just for a moment – the outside world ceases to exist. Memories surface, evoked by her inclusion of collected possessions: letters, clothes, keys, a bed: mnemonic objects that encourage introspection. Similarities are often drawn to the practice of Eva Hesse, or Louise Bourgeois, indeed, Shiota too prioritises the personal, often grappling with notions such as the immensity of grief, or the cyclical flow of life and death.
Shiota’s haunting installations become a nexus for dialogues with history. Alongside the presentation at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Shiota is contributing to the Melbourne Festival, unveiling a new public work The Home Within (2016) that will begin its journey at Federation Square and then migrates through the city, before residing at the Melbourne Town Hall for the festival finale. Recently, she has shown work at Detached, Hobart, and for the 26th Biennale of Sydney’s ‘Embassy of the Real’ on Cockatoo Island she created a melancholy mise-en-scéne in which a 19th century prison barracks was transformed into a gothic, dream-like universe; the beds of each ward pulled from the floor and suspended in an alien arrangement of intertwined black thread, confronting a history of sorrow, challenging our national complacency and the reluctance to revisit the problematic narrative of colonial history. For The Key in the Hand (2015), exhibited at the Japanese Pavilion of the 2015 Venice Biennale, Shiota erected a conglomerous mass of scarlet fibres that concealed the ceiling of several rooms, the viscous membrane was strewn with tarnished keys. Two dilapidated boats stood precariously tipped, the dimensions in this ochre realm had warped; floor became ceiling, as if the boats were suspended mid-air after being tossed upon a heaving sea of yarn.
While one may consider Shiota’s objects as tropes of nostalgia, it is her embrace of the personal that urges us to engage with sentimentality in a way that is not sensationalised, edifying or fetishised. Shiota’s installations are points of stasis, evoking poignant narratives and opening up a public dialogue about memory, place and heritage.
Anna Schwartz Gallery
7 October to 5 November, 2016
Melbourne
The Key in the Hand, 2015, Japan Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia
Photograph: Sunhi Mang
Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne
