Chiharu Shiota and the common house

Bilbao,

In Japanese culture, red symbolizes life, energy and sun, so that color is stained the threads that make up the large -scale facilities of the artist, born in Osaka, Chiharu Shiota, who through them speaks of interpersonal ties and the vital force.

His career is now reviewed by Azkuna Zentroa, in a sample, “My House is Your House”, which has commissioned Tereza de Arruda and that supposes the first presentation in the Basque Country of the interventions of this author, which feeds on found or disused objects that refer to the daily lives of many and also of memories. Their furniture, clothing and linked equipment are linked to the notion of home and also with fundamental moments and stages of all lives: birth, death, displacement; It does not reconstruct with them experiences, but deepens the spiritual and intimate dimension that can be associated with the spaces, instruments or clothes that serve as shelter. The tangled threads that link are, in turn, those that connect us.

Chiharu Shiota. My house is your house. Azkuna Zentroa

From the atrium of ancient Alhóndiga Bilbao to its exhibition hall we can review its journey, starting with its first facilities, after the paintings and performances with which it began, to last and unpublished works. Its link of union is precisely the concept of house, conceived not only in a private sense, but from the possibility of exporting some of its layers of meaning to public environments, in the same way that in the hands of this Japanese artist the particular stories are integrated into more broad, collective ones, in which it is also possible to detect a feeling of belonging.

Traditional fabrics and oriental calligraphs also survive in the patterns of their threads, which give rise to expanded and never simple drawings, in reference to human paths that are also. They sometimes hang windows or garments, memory pieces that insert a narrative aspect into these works. The proposals of this author generate their own spaces where they are presented: it is easy for the viewer to enter them forgetting previous incursions into immersive interventions.

The first of the facilities of the tour, Internal LineIt is composed of thirteen red dresses that represent absent people, who carried them, and also to the possibility of surviving the finite through memory. His fabrics are also house.

We will contemplate below My house is your housein which the home contemplates as a memory, identity, belonging and scenario center from which to perceive the passage of time, and testimonies of Becoming Paintingthe first performance he carried out while studying, when he began to become aware that painting was not enough to bring his own existence to art.

The engravings and drawings that integrate Connected to the universein addition to remitting a being connected to the universe by a thread, as a umbilical cord, they account for their talent to transfer their personal experiences in very different formats; And finally, Body and Soul It underlines the conception of Shiota of the body and its fragility as essential aspects of the human spirit, perhaps invisible and very relevant, signs of our transience.