ART-PRESENTATION: Chiharu Shiota-Connected to Life
Chiharu Shiota’s inspiration often emerges from a personal experience or emotion, which she expands into universal human concerns such as life, death, and relationships. She has redefined concepts such as memory and consciousness by collecting ordinary objects like shoes, keys, beds, chairs, and dresses, and engulfing them in immense structures of threads. She explores this sensation of “a presence in the absence” with her installations, and presents intangible emotions in her sculptures, drawings, performance videos, photographs, and canvases.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: ZKM|Karlsruhe Archive
There’s honesty in her artworks as Chiharu Shiota shares the intimate and fundamental moments in her life, heavy with meaning and truth, and encourages audiences to reflect. Investing her mind and body entirely in her interventions, her innermost thoughts and feelings turn into works of art offering a penetrating glimpse into her soul. Her entire oeuvre is somewhat autobiographical and somewhere between dream and reality. Discovering in 2017 that ovarian cancer had come back to haunt her after 12 years of being in remission, she became deeply conscious of her mortality and the close link between life and death. “I don’t make art as a kind of therapy for internal anxiety. In my case, the fear is necessary to actually make art”. Harnessing her distress to create, she realized that her force lay in this battle with death and turned her anguish into a message of hope. In Chiharu Shiota’s installation “Connected to Life” in the Foyer of the ZKM|Karlsruhe, a chain of 50 hanging beds cascades from the ceiling to the floor. The flow of life, which suddenly came to an end for so many because of the coronavirus with its many deaths, is present in the installation through the blood flowing through the tubes just as blood flows through the human body. These images of human vulnerability and misery call for a memorial dedicated to the suffering and lethal victims of the COVID-19 virus, but equally to the sacrifice of all those in hospitals and care facilities who are willing to risk their health and lives to save the lives of others. The red color in the plastic tubes calls to mind the lifelines of blood and oxygen. The installation also expresses the hope that human empathy and human science can help us to escape the current pandemic and its consequences. The impact of the pandemic on public life, private interactions, and the cultural sector is tangible. Closed museums, theaters, concert halls without visitors, and self-employed people wait for financial support and fight for their very existence. The pandemic has again brought to light the deficits in the health system, and hospitals globally are working at the limits of their capacity. The death toll is increasing daily, and new mutations make the virus harder to contain. The entrance halls of cultural institutions such usually a place of encounter, of exchange, where visitors, students, employees, school classes and artists mingle and meet. Without the current pandemic, they would be buzzing with life—now they are silent.
Photo: Chiharu Shiota, Connected to Life, 2021, Installation view ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, © Chiharu Shiota, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2021, Photo: ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Felix Grünschloß
Info: Curators: Peter Weibel and Richard Castelli, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Lorenzstr. 19, Karlsruhe, Duration: 17/3-11/7/2021, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00 (closed until further notice), https://zkm.de
