Chiharu Shiota. The Soul Trembles

MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale, Turin presents Chiharu “Shiota: The Soul Trembles”, curated by Mami Kataoka, director of the Mori Art Museum, who conceived the original idea for the exhibition, and Davide Quadrio, director of MAO, with curatorial assitance from Anna Musini and Francesca Filisetti.

This major monographic exhibition of the Japanese artist’s work will be held at MAO in Italian debut – and for the first time anywhere at an Asian art museum – after having been hosted at a series of prestigious international institutions, including the Grand Palais, Paris, the Busan Museum of Art, the Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai, the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane and the Shenzhen Art Museum.

It is a wide-ranging, complex, expressively powerful exhibition that traces back over all of Shiota’s production, through drawings, photographs, sculptures and some of her most famous environmental and monumental installations. Her most famous installations create massive structures, enveloping the spaces where they are installed, transforming them and leading the visitor through an immersive experience in which fascination alternated with anxiety, movement with stasis. The exhibition engages with all areas of MAO, transforming them in unprecedented ways, from the area reserved for temporary exhibitions to the permanent collection galleries, placing it in direct dialogue with the museum’s works. In addition to a series of drawings, sculptures, photographs and installations, the exhibition also includes site-specific works and pieces made specially by the artist for the occasion.