Chiharu Shiota’s signature red cord falls like rain throughout this room. Red is an important colour for the artist, representing the essence of life: blood, with all the information that it carries about us, and the sun, which brings life to our world. In this work, the cord envelops three towering red dresses. For Shiota, dresses are like a second skin, evoking a woman’s body and its indelible memories and experiences.

Shiota’s environments draw on personal experiences and collective ideas around memory, identity, and relations between people and places. Shiota left Japan as a young artist to study in Germany, where she still lives. Through recurring materials and symbolic motifs—ropes, threads, dresses, suitcases, paper, keys, and other objects—she conveys emotional and psychological states that are intimate, deeply interconnected, and infinite.