Chiharu Shiota. Remind of…

“I was given these wooden parts of brushes from a workshop in Switzerland that had to close after having existed for 136 years. The owner was about to retire and despite looking for a successor for years, he couldn’t find a person to continue the workshop. I like that the brushes come in so many different shapes for different uses and look like individuals because of that. They are hairless brushes that are not in use, that were waiting to be prepared by human hands in the shelves of the store for many years. I am thinking about all that while I am connecting them with my thread and give them a new life”.

Heir of Ana Mendieta and a whole generation of feminist artists form the early 70’s, Chiharu Shiota works with her body as an intervention space, realizing performances that deal with our link with the earth, the past and the memory. Well known for her installations with thread as main material, her symmetric tangles captivate the spectator at first sight, creating feelings that go between safety and fear, fascination and ugliness, while awakening memories, and both absence and existence as philosophical matters.

The presence and absence of her body is the thread running through her work, and ultimately is what makes it possible to understand her confrontation with the question of defining the artwork, the artistic subject and the public, the interior and exterior space.

In Shiota’s philosophy the true artwork is created only when the expectations for familiar artistic forms of expression are abandoned in favor of a perception of things that get by without any attributions of meaning.

Artists /