Chiharu Shiota at Haunch of Venison

A Room of Memory, 2009

1000 windows
Installation view at 21th Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanzawa, Japan
© Chiharu Shiota 2009, Photography: Sunhi Mang

West Galleries
19 February - 27 March

From the gallery website:

"Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota will present her first UK solo exhibition this winter at Haunch of Venison London, following her UK debut at the Hayward Gallery in 2009 in the group show Walking in my Mind.

The exhibition will include a major installation made from over 400 found windows from East Berlin where the artist lives and works, collected over the years from deserted and dismantled buildings, construction sites, disused psychiatric hospitals and uninhabited apartments. Stacked ceiling-high, lit from the inside, the frames are layered and combined to create their own building or structure, the windows transformed into something nearly spiritual. Central to the artist's work are the themes of remembrance and oblivion, dreaming and sleeping, traces of the past and her childhood, and the dealing with anxieties. Several years ago Shiota started working on room-filling; impenetrable installations made of black thread which arose from the artist's desire to draw in the air, and the start of the artist's Trauma/Alltag and State of Being (Zustand des Seins) series. These disorienting cocoons of black yarn often enclose various household and everyday, personal objects, a burnt-out piano, a wedding dress, a lady's Mackintosh. Shiota will create a new installation especially for the Haunch of Venison exhibition, as well a series of smaller boxed thread works, holding children's clothing, toys, scissors or mirrors."

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