“. . . a breathtaking exhibition of monumentality and lightness.”
Gallery of Modern Art’s (GOMA) yawning atrium has displayed an enviable array of artists and objects. From Carsten Holler’s slippery dip (Left/Right Slide, 2010) to Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir’s hypercolour Nervescape, 2016, and motorbikes suspended from above, art lovers know this space as one of spectacle and scale. Following months of billboard advertisements around the river city featuring Chiharu Shiota’s iconic use of red thread, the three-story gallery has been transformed again to host her epic work.
Uncertain Journey, 2016–2022, is an immersive installation of criss-crossing lines, rich with symbolism and allusions. It begins by your feet, with abstracted reductive boat frames, and grows into an ethereal canopy of thread. Moving through this symbolic landscape calls to life visions of refugees at sea, the networking of brains and the world wide web, and the interwoven histories of women and thread.
Chiharu Shiota, Uncertain Journey, 2016/2019, metal frame, red wool, dimensions variable; installation view, Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2019. © Chiharu Shiota. Photograph: Sunhi Mang. Courtesy the artist and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
Curator Mami Kataoka traces the exhibition’s beginnings to 2001, when Shiota exhibited in the Yokohama Triennale. “That was almost her debut for the Japanese art community because she left Japan after she graduated. Nobody knew her because nobody had seen her work in Japan.” Impressed by the “scale and power” of the young artist, Kataoka began following her practice. In 2016, she thought: “This is the time. She needs a survey show.”
Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles is a breathtaking exhibition of monumentality and lightness. This iteration at GOMA is also the largest survey of Shiota’s now internationally-renowned practice.
“She has installations, performances, smaller objects, photography, but this (Kataoka gestures to Uncertain Journey) is her most representative work. I wanted to show these to a larger audience, and, at the same time, I wanted to contextualise her work with chronological sections, showing the undercurrents of her practice.”
“The show is designed to elicit different audience experiences,” Kataoka continues. “It starts with her larger installations and moves to smaller spaces, combining the physical experience (of her work) with conceptual interactions.” Kataoka likens it to a rhythm of drama and intimacy.
In the first small space, works from Shiota’s early career confirm the ambitious proportions of her practice. I have Never Seen My Death, 1997, and Congregation, 1997, use and reuse 180 cow jawbones: collected from a meat processing plant, transported in batches on a train, and cleaned throughout the night over a gruelling six weeks. Grand themes of life and mortality that ripple throughout her oeuvre begin here, as do correlations with a fascinating mix of artworld luminaries, including Marina Abramović, Louise Bourgeois and Ana Mendieta.
Chiharu Shiota, A question of perspective, 2022, polypropylene ropes, 80mg paper, found furniture, cable ties, staples, 500 x 810 x 1215cm; installation view at Gallery of Modern, Brisbane. Commissioned 2022 with funds from Tim Fairfax AC through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation
A decade later, the artist walked a different city, collecting new objects. Inside – Outside, 2009–2019, is a circular wall made from old window frames, individually retrieved from Berlin construction sites. Shiota uses them to imagine Berlin’s people before the fall of the wall, disconnected, yet each standing within their home, looking through these portals. Her major new commission for GOMA, A question of perspective, 2022, marries Shiota’s interest in perception with her signature style. Within a rectangle of vertically hanging black ropes, an empty table and chair sit beneath a suspended flurry of blank white paper, signifying the enormity of Australia’s landscapes and the world beyond.
In 2016, Shiota’s brooding Conscious Sleep, for the Biennale of Sydney at Cockatoo Island, wove together small, unwelcoming beds, referencing the island’s dark penal history. In Brisbane, ghosts, childhood memories of a burning piano, and dispossessed Others continue to haunt her spaces, but here Brisbane’s sunshine also illuminates her practice, emphasising wonder and eternity. In her final work, About the Soul, 2019, Shiota asks children about this illusive, immaterial, and immortal component of humanity. Here, Shiota’s trembling soul – and ours in turn – is settled.
Louise R Mayhew is an art historian, writer, editor, creative mentor, and Founding Editor of ‘Lemonade: Letters to Art’.
Gallery of Modern Art
Until 3 October 2022
Queensland
