CHIHARU SHIOTA. “MY HOUSE IS YOUR HOUSE”
EXHIBITION
DATE
From May 27th to September 28th, 2025
TIME
From Tuesday to Sunday: 11:00 am - 8:00 pm
SPACE
Exhibition Hall
TICKET
Free admission
Azkuna Zentroa – Alhóndiga Bilbao presents My House is your House, an exhibition by Japanese artist (resident in Berlin) Chiharu Shiota, one of the leading figures in contemporary world art.
This is the first solo exhibition in the Basque Country by Shiota, known for her monumental installations woven out of woollen threads, the intricacies of which invite the viewer to engage in a poetic and dreamlike world.
The main themes in Chiharu Shiota’s interventions are time, movement, dreams, and memory. Her works are conceived out of everyday items, memories, and objects that have been found or are out of use. Her subjective vision and her experience are the starting points for the conception of her immersive works, in which she tackles the spiritual dimension of human existence through themes such as the home, migration, life and death. Garments, furniture, and other items are at the forefront of her works, generating a clear and universal narrative, irrespective of language, nationality, religion, or each person’s cultural background.
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2024 - "Internal Line" - Nakanoshima Art Museum photo by Sunhi Mang and courtesy of the artist.
“The My House is your House” exhibition, curated by the art historian Tereza de Arruda, uses the red colour and monumental scale to connect the Atrium with the Exhibition Hall in a tour ranging from her beginnings through to her latest installations that have never before been exhibited.
In this selection, Chiharu Shiota has worked in conjunction with the Azkuna Zentroa team on the concept of home, or casa/etxea, extending the domestic realm to a public space, in dialogue with the architecture of the Bilbao Alhóndiga [Bilbao Corn Exchange]. The result, as a site-specific installation, invites the viewer to experience different home settings that connect each visitor with his/her memories through everyday items. The artist has created the collaborative work Windows as an exclusive installation for Azkuna Zentroa – Alhondiga Bilbao, in which citizens share the essence of their homes through letters or drawings. This installation reflects how private stories form part of a wider collective story: a story of belonging and change that transcends individual experience and speaks of the universal.
“My House is your House” starts in the Atrium with a site-specific installation composed of 13 monumental red dresses that evoke blood. They are an allusion to clothing, that second skin that people wear, which does not establish distinctions or privileges. That skin is our protection, our shell, that we use to hide but also what we choose to show of ourselves. It is, in particular, a metaphor for the home itself.
Once in the exhibition hall, Chiharu Shiota creates various spatial occupations. Alongside a panoramic overview of the works produced in the past three decades, Shiota’s installations weave intricate threaded patterns, which refer both to traditional weaving and oriental calligraphy. The threads create a complex and expanded picture that does not have a clear beginning or end, symbolizing paths, stories, and experiences. The hanging items, such as clothes and windows, represent absent presences, evoking the fragility of life and the power of memory. In this way, the viewer is encouraged to explore the narrative potential of a work structured in a web, open and inviting, that stimulates the creation of new links. The installations themselves are also transitory, given that they are destroyed at the end of each exhibition. Only memory and the record of spatial artworks remain.
“My House is your House” is inaugurated on 27 May as part of Prototipoak Bilbao, the Azkuna Zentroa – Alhóndiga Bilbao International Artistic Practices Biennale, which is held every two years as a gathering for creators with a different perspective, from very different backgrounds, who question aspects of reality and seek to open up possibilities using artistic practices as their exploratory tool. They do so using contemporary forms, with their codes and their creation times, with backdrops and formats that change and with varied languages, proposing transformative experiences to their viewers that will persist as memories.
2024 - "The Heart in your Home" - Kunsthalle Praha photo by Sunhi Mang and courtesy of the artist.
