Chiharu Shiota’s Soul Trembles at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
The artist’s globe-trotting exhibition touches down in North America
As Chiharu Shiota’s exhibit “The Soul Trembles” traverses the globe, she cuts down her immersive thread installations and restrings them at the next destination. Born in Osaka, Shiota has lived in Berlin since 1996 where she continues to conceive her stunning works in fine art and performance. Her dramatic creations capture the imagination of museum goers with record setting attendance around the world. With this opening in Montreal, curated by Mami Kataoka of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and Iris Amizlev of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), the celebrated exhibition docks for the first time in North America.
“This is my life. All of my emotions are in my work,” Shiota says as the final touches were being put on the installation. After each exhibition she knows that the threads will be cut down and sculptural installations are reduced to piles of string. “I hope people can keep the memories and that their memories will last forever,” she says.
“I’m very happy that the set-up is done,” says Shiota at an early preview of the exhibition. “Everyone was so welcoming, and the opening was such a wonderful event. Montreal is beautiful.” Though the process of installing a show as large as “The Soul Trembles” means managing a team of several local students and artists, Shiota was able to find a little time to explore Montreal’s outdoor markets including the colorful Marche Jean-Talon that originally opened in 1933.
In a building designed by architects Edward and William S. Maxwell in 1912, the MMFA’s Beaux Arts white marble façade and a tall colonnaded portico may seem like a surprising setting for Shiota’s contemporary works. To enter the show, museum guests ascend the grand staircase under ghostly white boats suspended overhead, flanked in black fringe. This dramatic fleet is entitled “Where are We Going?” and offers a harbinger of the journey ahead.
This is my life. All of my emotions are in my work.
CHiharu Shiota
Inside the first room, a sweet flower painting from Shiota’s childhood greets visitors. On the same wall, a vibrant abstract painting marks the time when she quit painting, citing an inability to fully express herself in the medium. What transpired next was a series of performance art explorations, where she used her body and other materials. In “Becoming Painting,” Shiota covered herself in red enamel paint. She later wrapped herself in fabric, surrounded in tubes that resembled the flow of blood. Her arrival in Berlin led to studying with Marina Abramovic and participating in many body-focused photo and video works, some of which are displayed as visual representation of her evolution as a young artist.
The next gallery features an early fabric installation and a giant platform covered with doll furniture and flea market finds. These small objects have been painstakingly attached to each other with varying widths of red threads connecting her miniature world. In an art landscape that continues to push the boundaries of digital art, AI creations and technological advances, this focus on tactile bonds, from delicate to bold, throughout “The Soul Trembles” feels particularly poignant. Shiota can take viewers on an immersive, otherworldly journey inside her hand-woven thread creations.
One gallery features imagery and video from her theatre, dance and opera stage designs. “My last theatre project was the stage design for “Idomeneo, re di Creta” in 2024,” says Shiota. “Working with choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui was a great experience. I enjoy creating for the stage. It’s very different from an exhibition because I have to work together with many people and the performers have to interact with all the materials.”
“The Soul Trembles” continues with a large installation of windows called “Inside – Outside” that sits across from two hand-sewn white dresses with a mirror that are encased in a giant box frame covered in black threads. In the next room Shiota enrobes a hauntingly beautiful burned piano in black strings that wind their way out to an audience of chairs and every corner with arched passageways to navigate through.
In “Uncertain Journey,” the centerpiece of the show and the most recognizable imagery of her work, red threads burst from the frames of small boats swirling in tangles to the edges of the walls and ceiling. Looking at her installation work in photos and videos offer a glimpse of the visceral feeling of wandering through the beauty of Shiota’s world building in person.
The MMFA installation is the 10th iteration of “The Soul Trembles” since its original opening in 2019 at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Shiota brings the elements to each stop on the tour, but needs to reshape accordingly to inhabit each museum’s unique architecture. “The artworks themselves do not change,” she explains. “But the political climate and the museum space are always different, so the feeling within the installation might change. Sometimes the museum’s own collection is presented right next to my work, like at the MAO in Italy. Other times the museum asks me to create additional work specifically for the show.”
Working with Kataoka and Amizlev to shape how the exhibit would inhabit the original MMFA building has become part of the artistic process for Shiota. “The ceiling is quite low compared to other presentations,” says Shiota. “So the feeling changes. For the installation “Accumulation: Searching for the Destination,” the suitcases are normally suspended, but for this location that wasn’t possible.” In a gallery on a lower floor, Shiota decided to stack the suitcases all the way up to the ceiling.
Previous stops have gathered record-breaking audiences. “I am happy to see so many different people visit the exhibition, from children to elderly people,” says Shiota. “My artwork is about something deep and touches on fundamental questions about death, which I had when I had cancer. But some works are made with very mundane objects like doll furniture; they are connected to my life, and this is a life everyone can connect to, playing with dolls or facing the meaning of death. My work is very universal.”
As “The Soul Trembles” travels around the world, each stop on the tour eventually has a closing date. “I’m not sad about the de-installation, or about cutting the thread because I often already have the next destination planned,” says Shiota. “I’m excited to show at the next stop, and I’m thinking only about the future. The exhibition lives on in the memory of the viewer and memory is everything.”
“The Soul Trembles” is now on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) through 14 February, 2027.
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