CtC’s Artist of the Month is Chiharu Shiota (Osaka, 1972). Currently based in Berlin, Shiota’s work focuses on installation and performance. Working with memories, ideas of life and death and the past and present, Shiota uses everyday objects, imbued heavily with meaning, in room-sized installations, emphasising the complexity and entanglement of life. One of Shiota’s most recognisable works, In Silence (2008), features a piano, burned during an earlier performance, tangled with a series of empty chairs in a web of black threads. These threads are a recognisable aesthetic in most of Shiota’s installations, making an appearance regularly in black or red and making the considerations of the intangibilities of memory and the past into something eerily tangible and complex.
In 2014 Shiota was selected to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale 2015 where her installation, A Key in the Hand (2015), can be viewed in the Japanese Pavillion until the 22nd of November. Shiota attended the Kyoto Seika University, Japan, from 1992 to 1996 and from 1996 onwards went on to a further education at a series of Universities in Germany. She has exhibited extensively in both group and solo shows. Her most recent shows include; The Key in the Hand, la Biennale di Venezia, Venice,Italy, Follow the Line, Japanisches Kulturinstitut Köln (The Japan Foundation), Cologne, Germany, Chiharu Shiota : Works on Paper, Hadrien de Montferrand Gallery, Beijing, China, Seven Dresses Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Saarbrücken, Germany and First House, Zorlu Center Performing Arts Center, Istanbul, Turkey. Shiota is represented by ARNDT, Berlin and Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris.
For the month of June, CtC will present a selection of Chiharu Shiota’s works on the Facebook and Twitter pages.
Check the CtC pages regularly to see the next one.
Amy E. Brown
CuratingtheContemporary (CtC) 
Wow! These photos are incredible! Looks like a fab exhibition 🙂 x