Chiharu Shiota
Home Less Home – ICA Boston
Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art dedicates her first solo show in New England to Chiharu Shiota, as part of the Boston Public Art Triennial 2025.
From May 22 to September 1, 2025
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.
Chiharu Shiota: Home Less Home is organized by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Brianne Chapelle, Curatorial Department Coordinator.
The exhibition is supported by the Japan Foundation, the Richard K. Lubin Family Foundation, and an anonymous donor and featured as part of the Boston Public Art Triennial 2025.
The artist
Born in 1972 in the Japanese city of Osaka, Chiharu Shiota has been living and working in Berlin since 1997. Using woven yarn, the artist combines performance, body art and installations in a process that places at its center the body. Her protean artistic approach plays with the notions of temporality, movement and dreams, and demands a dual engagement from the viewer, both physical and emotional. In recent years, Chiharu Shiota has been widely exhibited around the world, including at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2003), the New Museum of Jakarta and the SCAD Museum of Art, USA (2017), the K21 Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf (2014), the Smithsonian, Washington DC (2014) and Japan’s Kochi Museum of Art (2013). In 2015 Chiharu Shiota represented Japan at the Venice Biennale with her installation The Key in the Hand. In 2018, she is exhibiting at the Museum of Kyoto; and in 2019 she exhibited at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo throught a exhibition illuminating the artist's entire works.
