Art Gallery Prague
Silence, spun from red and black
In her first exhibition in the Czech Republic, cult artist Chiharu Shiota takes visitors on a magical journey in search of the unstable soul.
An astonishing 400 kilometers of threads currently run through the Kunsthalle Prague, are spun inside and hang from the ceilings. The length easily reaches all the way to Berlin. The artist Chiharu Shiota, born in Japan in 1972, has lived there since 1996.
In Austria, she recently created a highly acclaimed work for the Salzkammergut Capital of Culture in the Ebensee concentration camp. In 2022, her Danube zills spun in red wool at the Landesgalerie Niederösterreich in Krems were fascinating.
The Vltava flowing through Prague inspired one of four room-filling, walk-in installations that can now be seen at the Kunsthalle Prague, which opened in 2022, in Shiota's first show in the Czech Republic. The Kunsthalle is a private institution set up in an architectural jewel from the early 1930s, the Zenger Transformation Station, with the primary aim of creating contemporary art impulses in Prague.
The Shiota personage "The Unsettled Soul" succeeds impressively. You wander through the Kunsthalle in fascination, in which Shiota has implemented wondrous places that expand perception. Poetic spaces of the soul and atmosphere that seek to raise questions about existence, transience, the past and the present.
The threads in "Crossing Paths with Fate", for example, hang from the ceiling like a wall of rain. The room seems to dissolve until floating boats emerge from the red mist.
For Shiota, the Vltava, like the Danube, is a passageway that facilitates exchange between people and cultures, a "carrier of our hopes and dreams". For Shiota, red stands for life and, like blood vessels, ensures human connections.
Clothes, one of her recurring motifs, swirl in the next room, as a symbol of the "second skin", as a reminiscence of one's own body. In addition to the recent installations, there is also an insight into earlier works, actionist photo series and videos.
In Shiota's work, the infinity of the cosmos finally stretches out in black, and the depths of the unconscious are explored. This can be experienced in "Silent Concert", where a burnt grand piano is trapped in an enormous spatial network. The instrument must remain silent here, as Chiharu Shiota says: "My true voice has no sound."
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