Chiharu Shiota
Sleeping is like death
Two years after inaugurating Galerie Templon’s Brussels space, and in the wake of her universally acclaimed participation in the 56th Venice Bienniale, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota is returning to Belgium with a brand new performance and installation.
Hospital-style beds are imprisoned in what looks like a vast spider’s web. They will be occupied by three sleepers during the exhibition’s private view. The performance Sleeping is like death is the latest expression of Chiharu Shiota’s obsession with the slumbering state: abandonment of the body, estrangement between beings, the presence of a body whose spirit is wandering elsewhere, dreams and reminiscences. The artist is demanding a dual engagement from the viewer, both physical and emotional.
The monumental site-specific installation envelops the space in the graphic interplay of its woven surfaces. Their angular and circular intersections seem to be drawing in the air. The artist, celebrated for her labyrinthine networks made up of clouds of threads, is here exploring geometric experiments and deconstruction. She Shiota is exhibiting a series of deconstructed and abstract sculptures for the first time behind the glass front of the Rue Veydt gallery. The exhibition concludes with the artist’s drawings, subtly portraying her mental projections.
State of Being (Mirror)
The artist
Born in 1972 in the Japanese city of Osaka, Chiharu Shiota has been living and working in Berlin since 1997. Using woven yarn, the artist combines performance, body art and installations in a process that places at its center the body. Her protean artistic approach plays with the notions of temporality, movement and dreams, and demands a dual engagement from the viewer, both physical and emotional. In recent years, Chiharu Shiota has been widely exhibited around the world, including at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2003), the New Museum of Jakarta and the SCAD Museum of Art, USA (2017), the K21 Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf (2014), the Smithsonian, Washington DC (2014) and Japan’s Kochi Museum of Art (2013). In 2015 Chiharu Shiota represented Japan at the Venice Biennale with her installation The Key in the Hand. In 2018, she is exhibiting at the Museum of Kyoto; and in 2019 she exhibited at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo throught a exhibition illuminating the artist's entire works.
