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Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972), who represented Japan at the 2015 Venice Biennale, is currently exhibiting at London’s Hayward Gallery. Known for her performative practice and immersive thread installations, Shiota presents herself to the London public through the exhibition Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life, on view from February 17 to May 3.

Photographs from the exhibition. From the Art Box portal archive

Best known for her large-scale, immersive environments made of intricate yarn networks, Shiota creates site-specific installations that are emotionally charged and conceptually layered, addressing life and death, memory, the human body, and what she describes as “existence in the absence.”

Her practice is defined by monumental webs of thread—often red, black, or white—that envelop entire exhibition spaces as well as everyday objects.

These monumental installations almost completely occupy and transform the gallery space. Networks of thread extend from floor to ceiling, wrapping objects such as shoes, keys, beds, chairs, and dresses, which in Shiota’s work become carriers of memory, traces of lived experience, and personal narratives.

In the Brutalist architecture of the Hayward Gallery, the installations acquire an even greater intensity. Red and black threads form dense, almost oneiric structures through which the viewer moves as through a landscape. The exhibition is therefore experienced not only visually, but also physically and spatially, as something to be entered and traversed.

“When it becomes impossible for the eye to follow a thread or an artwork, I start to feel that it is complete,” Shiota has stated. She began developing the thread-based structures that would later define her practice in her own room, after moving from Japan to Germany and living in a series of temporary apartments, searching for a sense of stability and home.

Alongside the large-scale installations, the exhibition also features new sculptures, drawings, and early performances documented through video and photography, offering a more layered insight into Shiota’s artistic practice and working process.

Although it may seem so at first glance, Shiota does not offer spectacle for the sake of spectacle. Her installations encourage interaction, photography, and selfies, but also a confrontation with oneself. Threads of Life is an exhibition that reminds us how fragile personal narratives are and how, at the same time, they are both deeply individual and archetypal.

In the context of the exhibition Threads of Life, particular attention from visitors is drawn to the work During Sleep, which is periodically activated through performers lying within the installation, thereby blurring the boundary between sculpture and the living body. At those moments, the installation “breathes” through the presence of bodies, while the audience observes sleepers who are at once both alive and motionless.

The installation consists of hospital beds entangled in a dense network of black threads that descend from the ceiling and completely envelop the space. Performers who occasionally lie and sleep in these beds shift the work between installation and performance, between sleep and wakefulness, presence and absence, and the body and its “unstable” boundaries.

Inspired by experiences of dislocation and the sensation of waking up in an unfamiliar space, as well as broader questions of memory, the body, and vulnerability, the artist creates with black thread an atmosphere often described as existing between dream and nightmare, while the hospital beds introduce a medical dimension of the body.

The Art Box portal editorial team thanks the Hayward Gallery for the opportunity to see this artist’s work in London, following the exhibition at the Mori Museum in Tokyo (2019), as well as to attend the performance.