Chiharu Shiota
Chiharu Shiota is a Japanese installation artist who settled in Berlin in 1996. Originally a student of painting at Kyoto Seika University, she soon began to develop three-dimensional installation pieces. After a stay in Canberra/Australia, she came to Germany to continue her studies at the Berlin University of the Arts.
Since then, her work has been shown at numerous international exhibitions. In 2012 alone, she had solo shows at the Moscow Manège, at La Sucrière in Lyon and the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art in Kagawa, among others, and in 2008 at the National Museum of Art in Osaka. She was also presented at significant group shows, including shows at CCC Strozzina in Florence and the Kiev International Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2012, at the Aichi Triennial in Nagoya in 2010 and the Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2009. In 2011, she created the stage design for Toshio Hosokawa’s opera “Matsukaze”, a coproduction of Sasha Waltz & Guests with the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, the Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg, the Polish National Opera and Staatsoper Berlin. In 2015, Chiharu Shiota successfully represented her home country Japan at the Venice-Biennial; her work “The Key in the Hand” attracted great attention.
A primary subject of her work is memory as something that exists, but is neither tangible nor verifiable. To this end, she often works with used objects. She displays their stories in extensive installations, often by weaving miles of black woolen threads around them. Walking through her installations becomes a physical experience that evokes a new sense of space.
As of January 2016