In The Unsettled Soul, the Japanese artist and student of Marina Abramović weaves a new approach for a fractured world
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 Marina Abramović 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.
For this show, Shiota was inspired by the Vltava – the river that runs through Prague, and links up with the Berlin via the Elbe – when she visited the Czech capital eighteen months prior to the exhibition. “The flow of the river,” says Havranek, became for Shiota “a symbol of the link between the past and the present, between different geographies, between stories and memories.”
Collective memory is another important theme throughout Shiota’s career. In 2004, she created the installation “From-Into” out of old, salvaged windows from demolished buildings in East Berlin, exploring the politically-charged ‘psychogeography’ of the region. The artworks in The Unsettled Soul perform a similar function, albeit in a “geography” of Shiota’s own making – as visitors walk through the artist’s abstract landscapes, Havranek notes, the artist’s memories are intertwined with the lasting memories she creates in the viewer’s mind.
Walking through the exhibition also feels like a pretty good metaphor for a broader tradition of sense-making in the 21st-century, where reality is held together by – quite literally – a thread. Visitors navigate each room, finding solid, sensible shapes in hundreds of kilometres of string: a house, falling ashes, an ocean. On the one hand, it shows how easy it is to be misled by our senses. On the other, there’s something touching about the undying desire to find stories and make new connections in an increasingly fractured world.
For Havranek, this experience gets right to “the essence of our being”. The world “is so uncertain from beginning to end,” she says, and art like Shiota’s is a valuable reminder of this uncertainty. “Maybe it makes us more able to face the world in all its complexity. It’s a way of meditating [upon] and accepting the fate of the human being.” This sounds like a good way to approach things, in a world that feels more complex and impossible to comprehend by the day... “Or maybe we’re just in a society that thinks it should not be so complex,” she suggests. “We forgot that we are just part of nature, a system that we don’t understand, and we can’t control. The work brings us back to humility.”
The Unsettled Soul is on show at Kunsthalle Praha until April 28, 2025.