Healing

Artists possess a precious ability: they can heal themselves through their work. Take Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (born 1972). She explains that when she decided to settle in Berlin—where she still lives today—she had to move nine times. In order to create a feeling of “home,” she stretched thread around her bed.

Web like protection

This web-like protection was primarily symbolic, but she later put it to great use in her art practice. Wool thread strung across space like a drawing has become the cornerstone of her visual vocabulary.

Brand-new Grand Palais

Through March 19, Chiharu Shiota is the focus of an exhibition spanning 1,200 square meters in one of the wings of the brand-new Grand Palais. Visitors are immersed in monochromatic environments of red or black that conceal a burnt piano, white dresses or boat skeletons. While each object contains its own symbolism (the piano recalling a childhood fire, the dresses a second skin), Shiota’s work seems to be driven more by the unconscious: “I weave to create a universe. When I start, I have a vague idea of what it might represent. Once it’s finished, I can articulate it better.”

Mami Kataoka

Shiota’s exhibition has traveled globally since debuting in Tokyo five years ago. Its curator, Mami Kataoka, director of the Mori Art Museum, has observed its consistent popular appeal: “She speaks of subjects that are shared by all humans: existential anxiety, life after death (she recently battled cancer and had a miscarriage), and healing too.”

Successful installations

The success of these installations can also be attributed to their astonishing scale—it takes over 200 kilometers of thread to create some works—and, simultaneously, their inherent mystery. What is hiding under these threads? Objects, but also feelings.

Not as powerful

One might regret that the flow of the exhibition, moving from one spectacular installation to the next, is occasionally interrupted by documentary spaces that contextualize her work. And then, her two pieces that don’t use thread in space are not as powerful.

Song Dong and Boltanski

Chinese artist Song Dong has for many years created facades assembled, like Shiota’s here, from disparate windows. As for her suspended old suitcases, these inevitably recall the work of Christian Boltanski.

Mendieta and Abramovic

From the viewpoint of contemporary art history, Shiota aligns more, according to Kataoka, with the suffering incarnated by Ana Mendieta or the body-centric performances of Marina Abramović. Yet as a thread-weaver working in a category all her own, this creator of immersive, colorful spaces excels. Louise Bourgeois famously likened her mother to a spider, a weaver. Shiota may well belong to a new breed of arachnids: draftswomen.

Through March 19. www.grandpalais.fr