Torin, 22 Oct. (askanews) – An exhibition of great impact, capable of resonating with the space that hosts it, but also of exciting and renewing the amazement in the face of contemporary art, when, without losing any of its strength and depth, it also reveals itself to be accessible. The MAO – Museum of Oriental Art in Turin hosts a retrospective of the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, organized with the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and entitled “The Soul Trembles”.
“Chiharu Shiota – co-curator Mami Katatoka told us – was born in 1972 in Osaka, but moved to Germany in the nineties. She is well known for her large installations, most of them with wire, but also for her always investigating fundamental questions, the meaning of life and death, and what it means to have a soul. All these questions are crucial and reach the public universally”.
On display are works with the red thread that have become very famous, especially after the 2015 Art Biennale in the national pavilion of Japan, but also other types of works, for example some extraordinary drawings. All in constant dialogue with the Turin museum and its collection.
“It was built in such a way as to continue the work we are doing at the museum – added Davide Quadrio, director of the MAO and co-curator of the exhibition – and to expand this idea of object, space and people who experience this space. In this sense the exhibition is not an exhibition of objects, although obviously there are many objects, but in reality it is an exhibition that invites reflection and a relationship between the museum space, with the objects that somehow evaporate, leaving the space instead to this artist who feeds on and somehow transforms the very space of the museum, building it in a completely new and at times almost unrecognizable way”.
And precisely the way in which the exhibition modifies not only the spaces, but also the, so to speak, emotional temperature of the MAO, is one of the subtle but decisive elements of the project. “Chiharu – added Quadrio, who also worked with the assistant curators Anna Musini and Francesca Filisetti – understood and understood that this was an opportunity to develop his work and his poetics in a way of restitution with respect to the museum collection”.
For the visitor there is then the theme of references to other contemporary suggestions and also that of the readings that can be given of the many works by Shiota exhibited in Turin. “Her works – concluded Mami Kataoka – can be interpreted in many ways, she does not make specific references to historical facts or to certain nations and cultures”.
The reference, probably, is the art itself, which involves the role of the spectator in the round. And just as his boats welcome that theory of red threads, so they can also accompany us in an intimate and universal experience at the same time. (Leonardo Merlini)
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