Threads of Connection: Chiharu Shiota’s ‘The Unsettled Soul’ Stuns in Prague

“How do you even go about making something like this?” I ask incredulously, looking at the room-spanning artwork. The artist smiles bemusedly and then says, “I start at the top, by the ceiling, and work my way down,” as though it were the easiest and most natural thing in the world to string 400 meters of red yarn into the large-scale yet diaphanous artworks in “The Unsettled Soul,” currently on show at Kunsthalle Praha in Prague. The exhibition marks the first solo show in the Czech Republic of Chiharu Shiota, a contemporary Japanese artist known for her captivating installations. Confronting fundamental human concerns such as life, death and relationships, Shiota explores the human condition throughout various dimensions by creating an existence through absence, either in her large-scale thread installations that include a variety of common objects and external memorabilia or through her drawings, sculptures, photography and videos.

Here, Shiota captures the space of the Kunsthalle and renders it into something spectacular, moving and arresting in four major installations that invite reflection on our lives and the invisible bonds between people and places. These works—some created especially for Kunsthalle Praha—intertwine the material and the spiritual, offering visitors a space to meditate on their own experiences and perceptions. Walking through, you feel as though you are a tiny cog in some great supernatural machinery; you have to see them in person to appreciate the full effect.

Shiota has gained global recognition for her artworks, which weave together personal history and collective memory through intricate networks of threads. She was born in Osaka, Japan in 1972, and now lives and works in Berlin. In 2008, she received the Art Encouragement Prize from the Japanese Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and in the years since, her work has been shown across the world at institutions including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2023); Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2019); Gropius Bau in Berlin (2019); the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide (2018); Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the U.K. (2018); Power Station of Art in Shanghai (2017); the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. (2014); and the National Museum of Art in Osaka (2008).

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Kunsthalle Praha is the newest addition to Prague’s vibrant art scene and hosts short-term art exhibitions. The largest work in “The Unsettled Soul,” Crossing Paths with Fate, uses thread as a metaphor for the delicate yet powerful connections between individuals, cultures and histories. The installation was inspired by Prague’s Vltava River, which Shiota encountered on her first visit to the city. She saw the river as a symbol of time’s passage, not only connecting Prague to other countries but also connecting people and their shared stories. It reminds me of 15th-century Italian artist Paolo Uccello’s Through the Forest in that it evokes a powerful, dizzying sense of being lost in a wood.

Another work, The Heart in Your Home, explores a theme that runs throughout much of Shiota’s work. Having spent years living between Japan and Germany, Shiota explores the idea of home as both a physical space and an emotional state. Red threads are woven through metal structures shaped like houses, representing the bonds of family, culture and belonging. These threads, often associated with blood ties, reflect not only the artist’s personal sense of being “in-between” places but also a more universal human longing for connection. In spite of this, passing through the house-like structures, the spectator feels a sense of unease: the vividness of the red is startling—blood-like—and the uniformity of the structures, lined up as they are in a row, gives a sense of the robotic.

A room with red and white dresses spinning perilously fast evokes further unease. Further exploring personal identities, the artist uses the dress as a symbol of a “second skin,” reflecting the boundary between the inner self and the outside world. The installation, titled Multiple Realities, features seven rotating dresses and eight suspended objects, moving as if breathing, creating a haunting, organic presence in the dim light. These garments evoke the traces of human existence, embodying Shiota’s exploration of the physical presence of an absence.

The exhibition also includes the powerful installation Silent Concert, which is centered around a burnt piano—an image rooted in one of Shiota’s childhood memories. After witnessing a neighbor’s house burn down, the sight of a piano reduced to ashes left a lasting impression. This installation captures the haunting absence of sound and the lingering memories that remain even when physical objects are lost and resonates with Shiota’s ongoing interest in the ways absence and loss shape our understanding of the world and is truly spectacular to see up close. All in all, “The Unsettled Soul” is ripe with meaning and with powerful insights about the human condition, with all its nuances and inconsistencies. It is, I think, one to not miss.

To complement “The Unsettled Soul,” Kunsthalle Praha will release an illustrated exhibition catalogue in February 2025, which will be distributed internationally by the prestigious Berlin publishing house DCV. In addition to extensive photographic documentation of the exhibition, the uniquely designed publication is bound in hand-stitched Japanese fukurotoji binding.

“Chiharu Shiota: The Unsettled Soul” runs through April 18, 2025 at Kunsthalle Praha in Prague.