TURIN.- MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale, Turin presents Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles, curated by Mami Kataoka, director of the Mori Art Museum, who conceived the original idea for the exhibition, and Davide Quadrio, director of MAO, with curatorial assistance from Anna Musini and Francesca Filisetti.
This major monographic exhibition of the Japanese artist’s work will be held at MAO in Italian debut – and for the first time anywhere at an Asian art museum – after have been hosted at a series of prestigious international institutions, including the Grand Palais, Paris, the Busan Museum of Art, the Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai, the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane and the Shenzhen Art Museum.
It is a wide-ranging, complex, expressively powerful exhibition that traces back over all of Shiota’s production, through drawings, photographs, sculptures and some of her most famous environmental and monumental installations.
Often inspired by personal experiences, Chiharu Shiota’s works explore the intangible – memories, emotions, dream-like images and visions, offering silent spaces for contemplation – and raise questions about universal and existential concepts like identity, the relationship with the Other and life and death.
Crossing temporal and spatial boundaries, her works deal with the most intimate, vulnerable part of the human being.
Her most famous installations, composed of red or black yarn entwined to create monumental structures, envelop the spaces where they are installed, transforming them and leading the visitor through an immersive experience in which fascination alternates with anxiety, movement with stasis.
The exhibition was conceived as a single large installation that extends throughout MAO, from the area reserved for temporary exhibitions to the galleries of the permanent collection, placing it in direct dialogue with the museum’s works. In addition to a series of drawings, sculptures, photographs and installations, the exhibition also includes site-specific works and pieces made specially by the artist for the occasion.
The works on view include some of Shiota’s most iconic installations: Where Are We Going? (2017–2019), in which the motif of the boat, recurrent in other works, evokes visions of uncertain futures and lives; Uncertain Journey (2016), composed of ship skeletons arranged in a space wrapped in bright red yarn, to suggest the many encounters that can take place at the end of each journey; In Silence (2008), in which a burnt piano and a number of seats for a phantom audience, covered with a web of black yarn, express the silence that follows destruction; Reflection of Space and Time (2018), which uses a dress and its mirror image to reflect on the presence in absence; Inside – Outside (2009), a work about the concept of separation between interior and exterior, private and public, East and West; finally, the monumental Accumulation - Searching for the Destination (2021), composed of hundreds of oscillating suitcases, symbolising memory, movement, migration and the archetype of the journey undertaken by each one of us.
In keeping with the tradition of MAO exhibitions, Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles was conceived as a living organism and will be accompanied by a rich public program of music, performance, screenings, talks and more.
There will also be a series of educational activities and workshops for schools, families and visitors of all ages, from young children to adults.
The richly illustrated bilingual catalogue, published in Italian and English by Silvana Editoriale and edited by Kataoka Mami and Davide Quadrio, will include contributions by international scholars and critics offering in–depth analysis of the artist’s work.
