Thousands of balls of yarn. All by hand.
Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life is at the Hayward Gallery until 3 May. The entire top floor — floor to ceiling, wall to wall — woven from black and red thread. Suitcases, keys, letters, beds, shoes suspended inside.
She studied under Marina Abramović in Berlin. Started as a painter, then performance, then thread. "With painting you're working in two dimensions, but by using thread I could draw throughout the entire space." The installations look tangled because sometimes they are — when the work gets dense and knotted it's usually her own feelings getting there first.
The objects she uses come from flea markets and donation boxes. A key is not a key. A suitcase is not a suitcase: they are things that were touched, carried, lost, left behind. Shiota suspends them in thread the way memory suspends things in time. The Key in the Hand, one of her most recognised works, fills an entire room with thousands of keys hanging from red thread converging into two boats. Keys to what, exactly, is not the point.
Twice had ovarian cancer. The second time, in 2017, she was starting work on The Soul Trembles at Mori Art Museum Tokyo. "It was a real possibility that I might die." She kept working. "I thought deeply about what happens to the soul and where it goes if I disappear." The show became the second-most visited exhibition in the museum's history. She didn't die and the cancer is in remission.
During Sleep is an installation with a performance: women lying in hospital beds encased in dense black thread. Still, enclosed, barely visible inside the web. It looks like what it is — the fragility of a body, the weight of staying alive. Happens monthly, free with a ticket. 7 March, 11 April, 2 May, 10am–1pm.
Downstairs, simultaneously, Yin Xiuzhen builds cities from donated clothes. Two shows, same building, same obsession with what objects hold after the person is gone.
Hayward Gallery, until 3 May 2026.
