At the Grand Palais, Chiharu Shiota capsizes our souls

For twenty years the work of Chiharu Shiota (born in Osaka, Japan, in 1972) has been shown around the world at a pace that has greatly accelerated: New York (2003), Düsseldorf and Washington (2014) Venice Biennale (2015), Paris au Bon Marché and Le Havre (2017), Kyoto (2018), Musée Guimet (2022), Chendu, Osaka and Biennale d'Aix-en-Provence (2024)… This time in the heart of Paris, she installs her installations, in the iconic galleries of the Grand Palais. And it is an emotion of another kind, but just as intense, that is offered to visitors. We think of the Rimbaud of Illuminations : « I stretched ropes from bell tower to bell tower; window-to-window garlands; golden chains from star to star, and I dance ».

These paths that lead us from individual experience to the universal

The traveling exhibition was designed in 2019 for the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and with its director Mami Kataoka, who is the curator. She has already traveled throughout much of Asia. Each time, however, it must adapt to the space offered, which was once again the case for these galleries, less vast than those of previous shows, despite the 1200 m2. The title remains unchanged: “The Soul trembles”, or “ the quiverings of the soul ».

These continuous tremors are those that Chiharu felt when she was told that she had cancer for the second time, in 2017. She says that her body and her soul then seemed to dissociate. How to keep a link between the two? And besides, how can we trace the paths that lead us from individual experience to the universal, or those that bring us together, we humans whose paths cross and uncross according to the territories we cross?

Thirty years of achievements

Three vast installations immediately plunge us into these questions. Uncertain journeya fleet of metal baskets in the shape of boats from which rises a spectacular harvest of red threads, is a first encounter with the immersive atmosphere of these compositions. We pass under intertwined vaults, a cradle of ropes. Red is obviously the color of blood, of this blood network which maintains life and the flow of relationships. “ These threads become tangled: sometimes they bristle and stretch as if to connect my mental universe to the external cosmos. It's a relationship that will never go away », writes the artist.

Chiharu Shiota, Uncertain journey presented in the exhibition “Chiharu Shiota. The Soul Trembles”, Grand Palais, in Paris in 2024. Scenography Atelier Jodar © GrandPalaisRmn 2024 / Photo Didier Plowy © Adagp, Paris 2024

There follow a few respite rooms through which we discover other productions by the artist: drawings, performance paintings. If the installations had to be tightened depending on the space, the exhibition, which covers thirty years of creations, is nevertheless the most exhaustive of all those of Chiharu Shiota: we discover entire sections of the artist's work that the French public does not necessarily know. Living in Berlin since 1997, Chiharu Shiota has often been called upon as a set designer in Germany or Austria, for opera with Tristan and Yseult (2014), Siegfried (2017), at the theater with contemporary plays for which she created landmark sets.

View of the exhibition “Chiharu Shiota. The Soul Trembles”, Grand Palais, in Paris in 2024. Scenography Atelier Jodar © GrandPalaisRmn 2024 / Photo Didier Plowy © Adagp, Paris 2024

The loss of memory dooms us to death

Then it's In Silencea terrifying forest of black cables which trap a piano and burnt chairs, a house devastated by fire and oblivion, where one actually shivers. Madly poetic, is this setting without music a dream or a nightmare?

Chiharu Shiota, In Silence presented in the exhibition “Chiharu Shiota. The Soul Trembles”, Grand Palais, in Paris in 2024. Scenography Atelier Jodar © GrandPalaisRmn 2024 / Photo Didier Plowy © Adagp, Paris 2024

We think back to the window, exposed upstream, of Reflection of Space and Time (2018), a white (wedding?) dress floating in a network of black threads, nets or squiggles, which can be perceived as a threat to virginal innocence. Unless it is the “ third skin » which Chiharu Shiota speaks of, the one “ made up of our living spaces, that is to say the walls, doors and windows which surround the human body ».

Chiharu Shiota, Reflection of Space and Time presented in the exhibition “Chiharu Shiota. The Soul Trembles”, Grand Palais, in Paris in 2024. Scenography Atelier Jodar © GrandPalaisRmn 2024 / Photo Didier Plowy © Adagp, Paris 2024

Clothes, like objects, keep within them, after we have left this world, a little of us. Absence is never so deep, it is the loss of memory that dooms us to death. So what kind of emotion is trapped in Connecting Small Memories (2019/2024) a host of miniature objects, toys of children without children, wrapped in red wool, receptacles of mixed memories, tenderness or regrets?

Chiharu Shiota, Connecting Small Memories (detail) presented in the exhibition “Chiharu Shiota. The Soul Trembles”, Grand Palais, in Paris in 2024. Scenography Atelier Jodar © GrandPalaisRmn 2024 / Photo Didier Plowy © Adagp, Paris 2024

Path of migrations and exile

What world looms in Accumulation – Searching for Destination (2014/2024), cohort of 422 dilapidated suitcases, anchored to the ceiling by scarlet ropes, gently rocked in an inexhaustible roll? “ When I look at a pile of suitcases all I see is the number of human lives they correspond to. Why did these people make this trip? I think of the feelings that animated them the morning of their departure », says the artist. Path of migrations and exile (which is also that of the artist far from Japan), major routes of global upheavals, universe of major crises in which connections will have to be reinvented.

Chiharu Shiota, Accumulation-Searching for the Destination presented in the exhibition “Chiharu Shiota. The Soul Trembles”, Grand Palais, in Paris in 2024. Scenography Atelier Jodar © GrandPalaisRmn 2024 / Photo Didier Plowy © Adagp, Paris 2024

There is, towards the end of the Grand Palais exhibition, a moment of deep breathing and a lot of hope too, the filmed sequence of a group of ten-year-old German students who were asked the question “ What is a soul? “. One of them replies: “ I think the soul is not completely destructible. It is similar to a house. You can add pieces or remove them. But you can't destroy a soul “. Chiharu Shiota's is hanging by a thread. Ours too, probably. But undoubtedly, at the end of this exhibition, we know that the thread is stronger than it seems.

« Chiharu Shiota, The soul trembles »
Grand Palais, Paris
From December 11 to March 19