Entanglements: Chiharu Shiota

Echoing the exhibition Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles, on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, this series presents a selection of films connected to the work of contemporary artist Chiharu Shiota.

In her work, Chiharu Shiota weaves tangled webs that offer a meditation on memory, the tribulations of illness, aging and grief, and the conflicts that make up the human experience. It is in this spirit that the artist presents us with a selection of films that reflect the theme of the human condition as a quest for meaning.

“I came to think that living and dying really belong to the same dimension [...] When our time is up, perhaps all of us dissolve into this universe. Maybe death is not a return to nothingness, but rather no more than a matter of assimilating into something: not an extinguishment from life into death, but a merging into something vaster than us. This is how I began incorporating death into my work: death not as an ending, but as something equivalent to life.” – Chiharu Shiota