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Chiharu Shiota: Home Less Home Exhibition

Location:

ICA Watershed Gallery
256 Marginal St
Boston, MA

About the Event:

From ICA Boston's website:


Chiharu Shiota: Home Less Home


May 22 – Sep 1, 2025

ICA Watershed


In her awe-inspiring installations, Chiharu Shiota (born 1972 in Osaka, Japan; lives and works in Berlin) foregrounds stories of migration, home, connection, memory, and consciousness. Using line in the form of string, Shiota creates immersive installations that underscore human connection and experience. For the ICA Watershed, Shiota will present two signature, large-scale installations that consider the ways humans collect memories and form connections as they move and travel: a site-specific iteration of Accumulation – Searching for the Destination (2014/2025) and a newly commissioned installation, Home Less Home (2025).


In Accumulation – Searching for the Destination, dozens of vintage suitcases hang from red rope, occasionally shaking with the turbulence of anticipation. For Shiota, who brought only one suitcase with her when she moved from Japan to Berlin in 1996, the suitcase symbolizes the starting point of a new journey. Home Less Home features an enormous field of red and black ropes forming the shape of a house. Within this symbolic form, Shiota suspends paper documents—passports, letters, immigration papers, messages—and embeds beds, desks, chairs, and tables to underscore how people create their homes through communication, stories, and objects. Together, these transporting works will consider the journey towards one home and away from another.


Featured as part of the Boston Public Art Triennial 2025, this exhibition, Chiharu Shiota’s first solo presentation in New England, amplifies the Watershed as a unique space for public art in Boston. In dialogue with the Triennial’s theme of Exchange, Shiota issued an open call to contribute images and stories that will be printed and integrated into her newly-commissioned work, Home Less Home.


About the artist:

Chiharu Shiota (born 1972, Osaka, Japan) is a Berlin-based Japanese artist who has been working at the intersection of performance, sculpture, and large-scale installation since the 1990s. Shiota is internationally renowned for her large-scale installations, which she has exhibited globally, with recent solo presentations at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2024); Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain (2024); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2022); ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe (2021); Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington

(2020); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2019); and Gropius Bau, Berlin (2019). Her work has also been included in numerous group shows and international exhibitions, including the 56th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale (2015) where Shiota represented Japan with her installation The Key in the Hand.



Image: Chiharu Shiota, Home Less Home (detail), 2025. Installation view, Chiharu Shiota: Home Less Home, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2025. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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