Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles

Chiharu-Shiota-Installation-view-of-Accumulation-Searching-for-the-DestinationHighlighting twenty-five years of Japanese-born, Berlin-based, Chiharu Shiota’s artistic practice, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) presents Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles, on display from 18 June 2022.

Shiota is renowned internationally for her transformative, large-scale installations constructed from millions of fine threads that cluster in space or form complex webs that spill from wall to floor to ceiling. Shiota’s beautiful and disquieting works express the intangible: memories, dreams, anxiety and silence.

Curated by Mami Kataoka, Director of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles is the largest solo exhibition of the artist’s work to date and centres on these seductive constructions, contextualising them with works on paper, sculpture and documentation of the artist’s performance and theatre practice.

“This exhibition at GOMA is the largest solo exhibition of the artist’s work to date and it will be a major drawcard for local and visiting audiences,” said QAGOMA Director Chris Saines.

Since the 1990s, Chiharu Shiota has developed an extensive performance and installation practice. Best known for her expansive, encompassing, room-scale installations of black, white or red threads, she attracted widespread public attention with her work from the Japanese pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

Born in Osaka in 1972, Shiota enrolled at Kyoto Seika University to study painting in 1992, but soon abandoned the medium in favour of performance.

From 1993 to 1994 she undertook an exchange program at Canberra School of Art, just as installation art was finding its way into Australian museums and galleries, before relocating to Germany in 1996 to pursue further study. She has been based in Berlin since 1999.


Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Stanley Place, South Brisbane
Exhibition: 18 June – 3 October 2022
Entry fees apply

For more information, visit: www.qagoma.qld.gov.au for details.

Image: Chiharu Shiota / Japan b. 1972 / Installation view of Accumulation – Searching for the Destination 2014/2019, in The Soul Trembles, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2019 / Suitcase, motor and red rope / Dimensions variable / Courtesy: Galerie Templon, Paris/Brussels / Photograph: Kioku Keizo / Image courtesy: Mori Art Museum, Tokyo