SPE - PERFORMANCE AND EXHIBITION SPACE     THURSDAY-SUNDAY    H 14.00-18.00

24 MAY 2014 - 12 OCTOBER 2015

Chiharu Shiota
A Long Day

CURATED BY FRANZISKA NORI

The Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio presents “A Long Day”, the new installation by the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, curated by Franziska Nori, created specifically for the exhibition space at Dello Scompiglio.  The exhibition features some of the most incisive aspects of the artist’s work, combining installation, sculpture and performance in a condensed space-time dimension.

In the creation of her installations, Chiharu Shiota takes on the great existential themes of man such as memory and oblivion, belonging and identity, fear and solitude, birth and death.

In “A Long Day” Shiota uses strands of black wool which she interlaces, through a lengthy process, into a dense weave, rendering the space impenetrable.  The installation encloses a table and a chair around which float white sheets of paper, static and frozen in time.

The artist creates three-dimensional images, scenes in which everyday objects lose their functionality in favour of emotive and symbolic qualities.  For the artist, the three-dimensional space becomes the canvas on which to paint an picture that is born from an intimate and private immagination but which in transposition acquires a universal dimension, a poetic symbolism that is revealed to the visitor in all its expressive power.  The black thread becomes a line, a drawing in the space and at the same time a trace of the body in movement.  The body is the protagonist of the installation despite its complete absence.

Chiharu Shiota is one of the most successful Japanese artists of her generation.  In her work she synthesises the two artistic threads that seem  to have influenced her the most: on the one hand the Japanese tradition of calligraphy, which cultivates the state of concentration of the artist prior to the single and unrepeatable act of the pictorial gesture, and on the other, the lessons  of Marina Abramović, of whom she was a student and according to whom the artist should work almost ascetically, in a spirit of meditative concentration that culminates in an act apparently simple, but filled with meaning.

Other resonances in Shiota’s work suggest the post-war Japanese artistic movement, Gutai, that has radically expanded the idea of the symbolic character of the painting transposing it into the third dimension of reality through physical performance, as well as Butoh, the Japanese dance theatre.

Going beyond the traditional artistic canons in favour of an espressive power that deals with the essence of the human condition and existential themes are the characteristics that set Shiota apart and render her work unique.

A Long Day

Chiharu Shiota was born 1972 in Osaka, Japan. After graduating at Kyoto Seika University and an exchange year at Canberra School of Art, Australian National University, Australia, by the mid-1990s she had moved to Germany, initially studying at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig and then at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. These experiences undoubtedly reinforced her concerns with the importance of duration in performance as well as with the intense power of the body – even when its presence is suggested rather than present. Shiota's oeuvre contains various art performances and installations, in which she uses different everyday objects such as beds, windows, dresses, shoes and suitcases. She explores the relationships between past and present, living and dying, and memories of people implanted into objects. To these she adds intricate, web-like threads of black and red. Today Shiota´s installations, sculptures and paintings were presented worldwide in different Museums and Institutions of international meaning such as the Rochester Art Center, Rochester, MN / USA,Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, , Tasmania / Australia, Museum of Art, Kochi, Kochi / Japan, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa / Japan, Casa Asia, Barcelona / Spain, La Maison Rouge, Paris / France, Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem / Israel among others. Chiharu Shiota lives and works in Berlin since 1996.