After years of closure for renovation work, the Grand Palais finally reopened the space under its monumental glass dome last summer for Olympic events and this winter for an enormously successful ice-skating rink during the holiday season. Now its first art exhibition, “Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles,” is in progress in another part of the massive building.
Shiota (b. 1972) is well known in the international art world for her impressive installations and performance pieces, but she has not had much exposure in France. This show rights that wrong, beginning spectacularly with “Where Are We Going?” (2017/2024), a huge cluster of what look like woolly white feathers hanging from the ceiling of the majestic domed stairwell at the entrance to the show.
Even more spectacular installations await inside. “Uncertain Journey” (2016/2024; pictured at the top of this page) is an immersive room-sized web made of bright-red yarn attached to and seeming to grow out of the ceiling, the walls and the rowboat-shaped wire frames on the floor. Visitors wandering under and through it may feel like they are inside a bloody womb, about to sail off on the journey of life.
Later comes another disturbing immersive installation, “In Silence” (2002/2024), also made of an incredibly intricate web of room-filling strands of yarn, this time all black. Under the tangled web are a burnt piano and blackened chairs, most of them missing their seats. This time, you might feel that you have been entombed, with the matted strings above your head weighing you down in your grave, or even attending your own wake.
This piece and its title have their roots in one of Shiota’s childhood memories, as do many of her works: “When I was nine, there was a fire at the house next to ours. The next day, there was a piano sitting outside the house. Scorched until it was jet black, it seemed an even more beautiful symbol than before. An ineffable silence came over me, and over the next few days, whenever that burning smell blew through the window into our house, I could feel my voice start to cloud over.” Unable to voice her feelings, she made them tangible in this installation.
In between these two monumental pieces are many smaller ones as well as photos and videos of her live performances and stage designs over the years. As I walked through the exhibition, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a show of Louise Bourgeois’s works I recently saw in Japan, in the same museum that participated in the organization of Shiota’s Paris exhibition, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (where Shiota’s Paris exhibition originated). The same themes, materials and colors pop up over and over again in the work of both women: birth, death, blood, family, hands, dolls, clothing, box-like structures, domestic life, etc. Like Bourgeois, a Frenchwoman who lived most of her adult life in New York City, Shiota is an expatriate who has left her home country, Japan, and now lives in Berlin.
In the exhibition’s wall texts, Shiota explains her works as springing from incidents in her own life, among them the return of ovarian cancer that had been in remission for 12 years. Like Bourgeois, she does not hesitate to connect her work to her own biography and psychology (think of Bourgeois’s identification of her huge black spider sculptures as her mother, both protective and threatening). Shiota is also constantly questioning her identity, the meaning of life, the meaning of home, her place in the world, the existence of the soul. You won’t catch many male artists making such connections.
This show is a wonderful start for the revamped Grand Palais, which will inaugurate a full program of art exhibitions and cultural events in June 2025.
See our list of Current & Upcoming Exhibitions to find out what else is happening in the Paris art world.
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