Artist Chiharu Shiota’s webs transport Montreal museum visitors to another world

Museums are always promising immersion these days as though every visitor were in need of a sensory baptism. Wafting scents at us, surrounding us with video screens or experimenting with virtual reality, they advertise “immersive experiences.”

The best work by the Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota is actually deserving of the overused term. Her vast webs of red or black thread fill large galleries – currently those of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts – transporting the viewer into elemental spaces that feel both novel and primordial.

For The Soul Trembles, the touring retrospective making its North American debut in Montreal after visiting eight Asian, Australian and European venues, the artist uses miles of string to build site-specific webs in black or red thread that produce a displacing effect, as though you have entered a geography or architecture that is totally unfamiliar. Perhaps that evokes the artist’s experience as an immigrant to Germany: Migration and travel are continual themes in her work, and the threads are often anchored in metal armatures shaped like boats.

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The Montreal installation features two room-sized webs, one black, the other red, as well as a more sculptural piece of white thread that hangs above the grand staircase of the museum’s old Sherbrooke Street wing, the Hornstein Pavilion.

The brilliance of Shiota’s practice lies in her use of scale. She produces work that is both very big – her installations are the size of large rooms – and that relies on numerous repetitions of materials or accumulations of objects, whether that is the thousands of twists and overlaps in the threads or, in two other remarkable pieces, dozens of old cracked windows and hundreds of miniature dollhouse objects.

The artist is 54 and, as this retrospective of 30 years’ work reveals, it took her quite a while to achieve mastery. Indeed, the room devoted to her student work of the 1990s and early career often makes her attempts to find her medium look downright silly. Frustrated with the limits of painting on canvas at art school, she became the painting, wrapping herself in canvas and covering herself in red paint for a performance that looks, to judge from photographs, hysterical.

This was her transition to installation and performance, but it was by no means a slam dunk. In 2002 she was doing a performance in the bathroom, covering herself in mud, a kind of body art that might have felt rather passé even at that time. As recently as a 2010 video, she was lying naked on the floor, covered in plastic tubing that represented the circulation of blood but moved it outside the body, to a soundtrack of a fetal heartbeat.

Yet, Shiota had found those connecting lines earlier in her career in a simple student gesture made while she was studying in Australia in 1994, a work on paper in which she lined up the brown husks of dried bean pods in horizontal bands. Lines connect; she sees in them a metaphor not only for travel but also for family relations and DNA. In Connecting Small Memories, an engrossing installation recreated at each venue after it made its debut at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2019, she uses red thread to bind and link together hundreds of little domestic objects, many of them pieces of doll’s furniture or other small toys.

In Uncertain Journey, the large red web that is the centrepiece of the show, the thread becomes a universe, whether you read that as an interior space, as though one were voyaging through the blood stream like characters in some sci-fi movie, or a new apocalyptic geography.

Does the soul tremble? Shiota has said she wishes to evoke strong emotions in viewers. Reactions will differ hugely from person to person; most visitors at the members’ preview last week seemed mainly intrigued by the red web. A black web covering a charred piano, inspired by the artist’s memory of seeing her neighbour’s house burn, is mournfully disturbing in comparison.

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Shiota talks a lot about her work; there is a video interview playing elsewhere in the galleries and the walls are studded with her poetic quotes as well as the museum’s didactic texts, relating the art to her thoughts about memory, death and the body.

“When a human life reaches its prescribed lifespan perhaps it dissolves into the universe. Perhaps death does not involve a transformation into nothingness and oblivion, but is merely a phenomenon of dissolution,” the artist writes about small sculptures inspired by cellular structures. “Going from life to death is not an extinguishment but a process of dissolving into something vaster. If this is the case there is no longer any need to be afraid of death.”

It is tempting to hear in words like these echoes of Japanese emotive literary traditions, such as mono no aware, an aesthetic philosophy sadly recognizing the transient nature of things. All this talk seems rather unnecessary; the successful installations are quietly visceral pieces, drawing on a modification of the viewer’s space or the massing of familiar objects that can be experienced at a simple visual, physical or instinctual level. They may delight or they may disturb, but like all good art, their presence as something outside ourselves is undeniable.

Interestingly, Shiota also has a career as a stage designer for opera and theatre productions. The show concludes with a room devoted to documentation about these projects, such as her sets for Gotterdammerung, Oedipus Rex and The Winter’s Tale.

When an audience enters a theatre, they leave the real world behind and are presented with a fictive space on stage, a site for cathartic action. Shiota’s art seems ideally suited to the task.

The Soul Trembles continues at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts to Feb. 14.