At the Grand Palais, we find its large installations on site, immersive, each time made of tens and tens of kilometers of white, red or black wool threads intertwined and knotted forming cocoons from floor to ceiling that are both very seductive and disturbing.
His exhibition is entitled The Soul Trembles (the quiverings of the soul). Rising above the monumental entrance staircase, the visitor sees like angel wings made of white thread, vaporous clouds made by a magician.
In the first room, several large boats restored to their metal skeletons are submerged in thousands of these red threads. As if they had been abandoned for a long time and imprisoned in monumental cobwebs.
Burnt piano
Beauty and fragility, life and death, come together in her home. From the outset, she reminds the visitor of the cancer that struck her in 2005 with its recurrence in 2017. Today her health is good, but she writes: “My soul is with my body. If my body disappears, does my soul disappear with it? How long can it stay close to my heart? Condemned to endure my illness for two years, I prepared my exhibition while trying as best I could to live and survive.”
The visual beauty of her works appears to be the antidote to the pain she felt.
In a moving installation, she placed pieces of her body cast in bronze on the ground with above, floating in space, pieces of red leather like raw flesh, held by red threads too, resuming the idea of the body separated from the soul. Life hangs by a thread!
Small sculptures represent these living cells that sometimes go crazy with cancer. They look like precious objects here.
In another room, plunged into darkness, chairs and a burnt piano are caught in an immense net of black wires. The reminder of a fire near her house which had traumatized her when she was nine years old.
Two wedding dresses are inaccessible to us in their intertwining of threads, taken from a box. Further on, she hung with her red threads a “staircase” of suitcases, that of exile, that of refugees still on the move. She also installed a large circular wall made up of dozens of used windows found in East Berlin.
The exhibition still shows his drawings and paintings. She recalls, with videos, the very physical performances that she learned from Marina Abramovic and Rebecca Horn, also evoking Ana Mendieta, with her body immersed in earth and mud. In a performance reminiscent of those of the Viennese Actionists, she covers herself in red paint like blood.
The exhibition, with videos, shows his opera productions, including one of Wagner’s Ring.
Chiharu Shiota is “the presence of absence”, dramas translated into hope, shadow and light, the beauty of life, but also anxiety in the face of death.
Michaël Borremans, the painter of enigma
The choice to open contemporary art at the Grand Palais with Chiharu Shiota is indicative of the desire to open the place to the general public while choosing artists recognized by lovers of contemporary art. The Grand Palais will therefore offer a double exhibition at the end of 2025 with Eva Jospin and Claire Tabouret. Two great artists who also reach a wide audience.
We will come back, in The Freeon the construction site of the Grand Palais and its very rich program.
- Chiharu Shiota, Grand Palais, Paris, until March 19. Rens.: Grandpalais.fr/fr/evenement/chiharu-shiota. Catalog available from Skira.
