Chiharu Shiota, Over the Continents, 2014, Installation View Smithsonian Institution. Arthur. M. Sackler Gallery, Washington D.C., USA. Photo by John Tsantes. Courtesy of the artist and Smithsonian Institution.
Chiharu Shiota, Infinity, 2015, Installation view Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris – France, Photo by Sunhi Mang. Courtesy of the artist, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton and Anna Schwartz Gallery.
There’s an Australian thread running throughout the tangled woollen webs woven by Japanese-born, Berlin-based artist Chiharu Shiota. You can figuratively trace it with your finger, starting with her experience as an exchange student at the Australia National University of Canberra School of Art in 1994.
Over the course of 10 days in 2011, she built a convoluted network of yarn around the charred instrument at Hobart’s Detached. The following year, she stalked the corridors of the TarraWarra Museum of Art, her black yarn cocooning a double bass in the TWMA Vista Walk for State of Being.
More recently, she dived directly into Australian history for the 20th Biennale of Sydney, creating a site-specific installation in a 19th-century sandstone building on Cockatoo Island that referenced the property’s history as a prisoners’ barracks.
Shiota is now stringing along to Australia yet again for a major solo exhibition at Anna Schwartz Gallery, which has been representing her since her appearance at the 56th Venice Biennale Japan Pavilion last year. Twine in tow, she will take over the Melbourne gallery space, casting her complicated webs to expand on the key themes of her practice: “the question of existence, the awakening of consciousness to silence, to the traces [of] objects and subjects that are no longer present”.
“My creations with thread are reflections of my own feelings,” Shiota said in a statement. “A thread can be a cut, a knot or a loop, or can be loose or sometimes tangled. A thread to me is an analogy for feelings or human relationships.”
Chiharu Shiota
Anna Schwartz Gallery
4 October – 5 November
Have you ever wondered if someone who is no longer alive could create art? In answer to this question, biological artists Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson and Matt Ringold, in collaboration with the now deceased Alvin Lucier, have extended the experimental composer’s “ideas about the resonance of sound” for their immersive exhibition, Revivification at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
A quiet power pulses through It’s Always Been Always at Fremantle Arts Centre, where six First Nations women artists reflect on kinship, Country and cultural memory.
Under Sammy Hawker’s gentle guidance, whale song takes shape, ocean water becomes collaborator, salt crystals scatter themselves like stars across analogue film, and ashes murmur secrets onto silver nitrate-soaked paper. Through what she terms “facilitated acts of co-creation,” Hawker gives voice to places, materials, and the more-than-human world.
Step inside Monica Rani Rudhar’s space at Parramatta Artists Studios, where she works across ceramics, sculpture, video, performance, and latterly, public art. Rudhar is working towards her solo exhibition at Martin Browne Contemporary, while reflecting on the value of play, how imitation leads to authenticity, and why she’d be lost without her sketchbook.
At once an exhibition, performance series, and community-led workshops, Push / Pull is an ambitious program that brings together themes and areas of focus that honour the histories of Adelaide Contemporary Experimental as a platform for radical experimentation.
Artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino have been recommissioned by Creative Australia as the Artistic Team for the Australia Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
