Threads of Life — The Art of Chiharu Shiota
There is a Japanese legend that says every person is born with a red thread tied around their little finger, connecting them to the people they are destined to meet. Shiota has devoted her practice to making that thread visible.
Born in Osaka in 1972, Shiota has lived and worked in Berlin since 1996, a city she arrived in as an art student who had already concluded that painting wasn't enough. Trained in the early nineties by Marina Abramović, she came of age in a Berlin still bearing the scars of reunification. It feels like that tension never left her work.
Shiota’s vast networks of yarn stretch through gallery rooms, enveloping beds, shoes, keys, dresses, boats and windows, each object chosen not for its aesthetic quality but for the life embedded in it. These old objects have belonged to someone, carried a story, absorbed an attachment, and in Shiota's hands they become evidence of lives lived, traces of presence held in suspension.
There is an undeniable resonance in Shiota's practice with Shibari, the Japanese art of rope binding, not as a direct influence she has claimed, but as a cultural current running beneath her work. Both practices involve the deliberate, patient act of wrapping and binding a body or object; both treat restraint as a form of reverence rather than restriction. Where Shibari suspends the body, Shiota suspends the objects once touched by the body.
Threads of Life is Shiota's first major solo exhibition in a London public gallery, and it carries the weight of that milestone. Taking over the top floor of the Hayward Gallery on London's Southbank until 3 May 2026, the show brings together some of her most celebrated installations, reimagined for the space.
The Locked Room (2016) returns, enveloping furniture in dense webs as if suspending memories in time. During Sleep (2026) is a new iteration of an earlier work from 2002, activated with live performances on select dates. Walking through the space feels less like visiting a gallery and more like stepping inside a nervous system, or a dream that belongs to someone else, yet somehow feels familiar. Letters of Thanks invites visitors to contribute handwritten letters of gratitude to anyone who has touched their lives, suspending these hundreds of private acknowledgements in cascading threads that form a corridor.
Hayward's brutalist architecture turns out to be a surprisingly perfect container for Shiota's work. When the show closes, the threads will be cut and discarded, as they always are. That, too, is the point.
Words by Botelo