Arte e Arti - Archivio

– translation Flavia Micilotta –

In her artistic path, the Japanese artist, Chiharu Shiota, confronts the eternal existential issue of our mortal transit as a feeling of gentle unfolding through time between our inescapable beginning and end.
Stretching strings out in space, with ordinary objects today in disuse, like cloths and beds, shoes and suitcases, soaked up in the eventful lives of their proprietors, the artist creates large installations, evocative and emotionally charged that go beyond culture limitations and are rendered universal.
Chiharu Shiota is marked by the loss of loved ones in the horrific heart quake which devastated Japan, unleashing a tsunami and the nuclear disaster of Fukushima on the 11th of March 2011. She therefore translates her personal take on grief and loss in the universal language of art, through works of art veined by a certain shade of gloom which opens up to a ray of hope from within the deepest darkness.
The artist was commissioned to set up the Japanese pavilion’s installation at the 56th International Art Exhibition, at La Biennale di Venezia, which recently launched and is open to the public until the 22nd of November. Chiharu Shiota has expressly created a bright piece of work, “The Key in the Hand” both esoteric and untouched by the darkness of pain while capable to unleash to the audience the elegant vision of a compelling beauty.

Thousands of keys which Chiharu Shiota has collected all over the world from people who did not use them anymore, are hanging in the space tied to countless red strings, stretched in every direction and generating a tangled forest, giving the illusion of a mysterious hole, where like in a treasure cave, we find keys scattered on the floor.
The keys, as a concrete mean of access to people’s private places. Homes which like a treasure chest hold the most personal items and those individual universes become symbols of memory, fragments of lives full of joy and sorrow.

In this sense, giving to each key the value of a single existence, the sublime vision of this purple infinity populated by suspended souls becomes a metaphysical representation of the Bardo and its transit of past and future memories but even tangible human relations.
The stretched strings become ties forged by the life we live everyday next to the keys as our entry point to the internal dimension of strangers that unfold to each other; mimicking a friendship can that spring, flourish and grow from the sudden sharing of the most intimate secret.

At the base of such overwhelming red rain two wooden boats gather, as palms of hands, the wealth of remembrance that the strings, coming from all directions, bring with them.
The boat as physical and metaphysical symbol of travel, transports hopes and desires, together with people and things, pushing off in the sea of memory gathering fragments of life. On the ground floor of the Japanese pavilion, outside under the pillars supporting the structure, continuous projections of shorts movies with children telling memories of their birth stimulate the audience to go back to their own memory and dig deep in those forgotten moments.

The Key in the Hand is a sensorial experience inviting to contemplation, the video testimonial I realised cannot transmit the emotion of being dominated by an ongoing dialogue between the body and the mystical beauty of this art work. Nevertheless, my testimonial compensates the short-lived nature of this work which at the end of the exhibition will not leave any trace in the physical world, anticipating the destiny which awaits each one of our terrestrial egos.

Didascalie immagini

1. L’artista Chiharu Shiota fotografata da Sunhi Mang
2. Chiharu Shiota, The Key in the Hand, installazione, padiglione Giappone, Giardini della Biennale, Venezia
3. Chiharu Shiota, The Key in the Hand, installazione, padiglione Giappone, Giardini della Biennale, Venezia
4. Chiharu Shiota, The Key in the Hand, installazione, padiglione Giappone, Giardini della Biennale, Venezia
5. Chiharu Shiota, The Key in the Hand, installazione, padiglione Giappone, Giardini della Biennale, Venezia

In copertina:
Chiharu Shiota, The Key in the Hand, installazione, padiglione Giappone, Giardini della Biennale, Venezia
[particolare]