CHIHARU SHIOTA AND THE ECHO OF THRESHOLDS
| By Eleonora Giglione |
Till June 28th 2026, the MAO in Turin will host The Soul Trembles by Chiharu Shiota, a retrospective that transcends the notion of a simple exhibition to become a vast, pulsating organism of memory, pain, hope, and rebirth. Curated by Mami Kataoka, a leading figure in the field of contemporary art, and Davide Quadrio, with curatorial assistance from Anna Musini and Francesca Filisetti, the exhibition transforms the museum’s spaces into an emotional limbo, a path through suspended presences and invisible narratives. Taken as a whole, the exhibition does not merely recount Chiharu Shiota’s career but invites visitors to cross an inner threshold.
Shiota, born in Osaka in 1972 and raised in an environment where fishing and physical labor marked the rhythm of daily life, has made thread, red or black, the metric of memory, vulnerability, and human connection. After moving to Berlin, she explored physicality and fragility, translating them into a language of bodies, absences, and vibrating spaces.
Tangles of knotted threads surround empty chairs, half-open doors, suitcases hanging in suspension: dark signals of departures and returns that never materialized, of inner migrations persisting across time and space. The suitcases, weightless yet full, sway imperceptibly: mute custodians of broken stories and desires for escape. Then come the documentations of performances, still breathing within the images that capture them, in video or photography, pockets of rarefied air crystallized into the precious oppositions of materials that penetrate one another without ever fully merging.
Visiting The Soul Trembles, Exhibition Chiharu Shiota, MAO Torino
A hollow dress, suspended in a labyrinth of black threads, becomes the imprint of a lost body. Beside it, sketches and drawings pulsate with nervous lines that reveal the moment in which an idea seeks its form, matter searching for flesh.
Among the installations inhabiting The Soul Trembles, Shiota’s vision unfolds like a dream suspended between memory and expectation. Symbols of hypothetical futures and departures never entirely concluded, the red threads pulse like invisible veins connecting possible encounters and directions yet to be chosen. In this theatre of absences, In Silence dismantles every prediction: a burned piano and empty seats emerge from a mesh of black threads, returning silence as the imprint of what once was, sound defined in the negative. Inside-Outside traces delicate lines between interior and exterior, between Berlin’s East and West, revealing how every boundary is simultaneously barrier and passage, limit and opening. And then there is Accumulation – Searching for the Destination, the monumental kinetic constellation of hundreds of oscillating suitcases: a collective movement that transforms travel, with its migrations, departures, and returns, into a choreography of shared precariousness. Each suitcase seems to breathe, suggesting at the same time the possibility of movement without a place.
Visiting The Soul Trembles, Exhibition Chiharu Shiota, MAO Torino
Together, these works do not merely recount Shiota’s art but speak to the universal condition of being human: the ceaseless tension between absence and presence, between the desire to depart and the desire to belong, between the silence that swallows and the light that remains to illuminate the path. Life in limbo: the vibration of the sign in empty space.
Expanses of miniature furniture, cribs, tiny beds, doll-sized chairs, locked within a net of thin threads and pins, appear magnified as relics of an ancient childhood still fiercely alive: they embody a time that cannot be recovered yet continues to exist within the captivity of a growth from which one cannot escape.
Visiting The Soul Trembles, Exhibition Chiharu Shiota, MAO Torino
From intimate interiors to the vastness evoked by spaces of travel and transformation: boats without water, suspended windows like frames of invisible cities, corridors woven from absence and expectation. Every threshold, whether minimal or monumental, opens not onto recognizable landscapes but onto an inner backdrop that demands exploration, with a filament of light, slender and blinding at once, like the one that can surprise you when rising back from the depths of a silent ocean.
Completing the exhibition are preparatory drawings and sketches, dioramas, small and grand scenes that reveal the most intimate core of her process: nervous, swift lines that seem to capture the primordial impulse of the work before it expands into space. They appear as traces of the instant in which thought materializes.
Visiting The Soul Trembles, Exhibition Chiharu Shiota, MAO Torino
The exhibition also addresses her work as a theatre scenographer, where thread becomes dramaturgical element, landscape, and gesture, capable of amplifying the psychological tensions and inner movements of the characters. These scenic experiences reverberate through the installations at the MAO: spaces that are not merely observed but must be crossed as if moving through the wings of an interior drama.
A crucial element is the dialogue between the MAO’s permanent collection and Chiharu Shiota’s exhibition, opening like a subtle bridge between cultures, eras, and artistic sensitivities. The museum’s spaces, already imbued with the sober elegance of Eastern works, amplify the emotional tension of the artist’s red and black threads, which weave among sculptures, ritual objects, and ceramics, engaging with every volume and surface. The installations, monumental yet delicate, seem to animate the objects of the collection, while the light filtering through the threads transforms the rooms into environments suspended between East and West, between historical memory and contemporary introspection. In this encounter, the MAO becomes not merely a container but an integral part of the artwork itself: the architecture of the collection becomes scenery, the voids between the rooms become breaths, and the relationships between ancient objects and Shiota’s contemporary materials create a poetic continuum that expands both vision and sense of space.
The Soul Trembles is not a sequence of isolated works but an emotional elastic drawn to its point of maximum tension, the instant before the break, an invitation to see shadow as a creative womb and fragility as a promise of transformation. Visitors leaving the MAO carry within them a woven fabric of invisible relations, memories seeking recognition, gazes waiting to be found.
In this sense, the exhibition becomes a possibility: the possibility of reinterpreting loss as relationship, of transforming solitude into encounter, of turning thread not into a limit but into a bridge between who we were, who we are, and who we may become.
The Soul Trembles demonstrates that art can be a network of care, an act of shared memory, an invitation to listen to what remains human, not only within matter, but in spite of it.
For info and tickets:
https://www.maotorino.it
