Fil Rouge

by Fabrizio Mifsud Soler.

All photos: Chiharu Shiota

At Kunstraum Dornbirn, in what was formerly an assembly hall, a red, entwined labyrinthine mesh hangs overhead. Precisely fitted into a protective historical architectural casing, an uncountable number of red lines are connected. The evocative installation “Who am I Tomorrow?” by Chiharu Shiota hovers above visitors and unfolds as a fascinating impression of an independent, living and oversized organism.

Cardiovascular systems drive us. With a heartbeat of about 70 beats per minute, approximately 10,000 litres of blood are pumped into around 100,000 kilometres of blood vessels every day in the average human body. We live, work, sleep, love and suffer, physically driven by a constantly functioning cardiovascularity. As she turns the inside out, Shiota isolates this blood circulation from the systemic whole of a human body, enlarges it and inserts it site-specifically into the hall structure which now surrounds it. The function of a heart is taken over by pumps, which move apparent blood through the veins.

In the exhibition, the absence of a corresponding body is there to reflect the diametric opposite: namely the conscious presence of the body. The direct connection of the inside with the outside corresponds to a layering in the artistic work: the inner organism surrounded, protected, sheltered. For in reality, without a body, the circuit simply does not exist. It is interwoven into a sophisticated system in which a loss of function of one part affects all the others.

In this universal context, blood stands not only allegorically but factually for the individual’s information about origin, health and illness. In the best case, blood is hidden, imperceptible, absent to the senses and thus fascinating or frightening, for its visibility is associated with injury and extreme situations.

Morphosis exhibition_ph.Federico_Florian

At “Who am I Tomorrow?”, the analogy of the artistic intervention to the circulation of the blood is not limited to humans. It is equally valid for other living beings and so formulates the connection of human being with its environment – a central theme in Shiota’s work. For almost three decades, she has been developing a consistent, highly aesthetic and internationally successful formal language. In it, she negotiates her own history, her identity and the cultures in which she grew up and lived/s. She works with the connotative attributions she experiences as someone who has recovered from cancer, as someone traumatised by a miscarriage. In her expansive installations, such as her now iconic thread tangles, Shiota creates imaginary spaces of real stories which provide identity-forming narratives.