SESC Pinheiros, São Paulo
September 12, 2015 — January 10, 2016
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Download press release [portuguese] [english]
From September 2015 to January 2016, SESC Pinheiros will be showing "Chiharu Shiota - Searching for the Destination", the Japanese artist's first Latin American exhibition. Her large- scale installations consist of meshes of yarn and everyday objects – prompting the British newspaper The Guardian to describe her as a spider-woman "who clambers around in the skeins of our unconscious."
The exhibition will be taking place at the same time as Shiota's pieces representing Japan are shown at the 56th Venice Biennale. Curator and art historian Tereza de Arruda has placed three works – "Over the continents", "Accumulation", and "Letters of thanks "– on a visitor route around the exhibition space continuing through different areas of the venue. Installations discuss issues such as memories and trajectories. For this experience, as Chiharu usually does for her projects in different countries around the world, she asked people of all ages to help build the installations by donating shoes and handwritten letters of thanks as raw materials to be combined with a collection of suitcases she pieced together in Germany, where she has been living since 1996.
As a result, visitors experiencing her installations will initially see Chiharu's own journey: these works sum up her first artistic initiatives back in Japan, her move to Berlin and the subsequent maturing of her work in the European context. Then visitors are asked to take a seat in an exercise of poetic inflection instigated by the contrast between the simplicity of Chiharu's chosen resources and the narrative potential of the imaginary architected from them – few objects show and hide, reveal and preserve, or are at the same time as public and intimate, as letters, suit cases and shoes.
About Chiharu Shiota
Chiharu Shiota was born in Osaka, Japan in 1972. Since 1996, she has been living and working in Berlin, where he studied art with Rebecca Horn and Marina Abramovic, which led to her interest in performance art for his first artistic experiences. Later Chiharu decided to make the large-scale installations that led to her definitive involvement on the international art scene and experiences around the world in which she takes used or worm objects used as letters, keys, beds, suitcases or shoes and hangs them on strings, or organizes or stacks them in heaps. Chiharu likes to construct webs held up by past and the present, maturing a style in which the narrative charge of her works combines intimate experiences shared with viewers.
In 2007, she was awarded the Japanese Ministry of Education's "Art Encouragement" prize for her exhibition "From in Silence". Her solo exhibition venues have included the Smithsonian Institution Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC (2014); the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2013); Museum of Art, Kochi (2013); Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa (2012); Casa Asia, Barcelona (2012); and National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2008). She has shown at several international exhibitions such the Contemporary Art Biennial in Kiev, Ukraine; Art Setouchi, the Yokohama Triennial and the Aichi Triennale, Japan; the Moscow Contemporary Art Biennial, Russia; the International Biennial of Seville, Spain and the Gwangiu Biennial, South Korea; the Venice Art Biennale, Italy. She has also designed sets for the theater, opera and dance.
www.chiharu-shiota.com
SESC PINHEIROS [visit website]
Rua Paes Leme, 195 - Pinheiros, São Paulo, SP
Exhibition period: September 12, 2015 — January 10, 2016