Chiharu Shiota One Place West Galleries 19 February - 27 March
Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota will present her first UK solo exhibition this winter at Haunch of Venison London, following her UK debut at the Hayward Gallery in 2009 in the group show Walking in my Mind.
The exhibition will include a major installation made from over 400 found windows from East Berlin where the artist lives and works, collected over the years from deserted and dismantled buildings, construction sites, disused psychiatric hospitals and uninhabited apartments. Stacked ceiling-high, lit from the inside, the frames are layered and combined to create their own building or structure, the windows transformed into something nearly spiritual.
Central to the artist’s work are the themes of remembrance and oblivion, dreaming and sleeping, traces of the past and her childhood, and the dealing with anxieties. Several years ago Shiota started working on ‘room-filling’; impenetrable installations made of black thread which arose from the artist’s desire to “draw in the air”, and the start of the artist’s Trauma/Alltag and State of Being (Zustand des Seins) series.
These disorienting cocoons of black yarn often enclose various household and everyday, personal objects – a burnt-out piano, a wedding dress, a lady’s Mackintosh. Shiota will create a new installation especially for the Haunch of Venison exhibition, as well a series of smaller ‘boxed’ thread works, holding children’s clothing, toys, scissors or mirrors.
Shiota recently designed the stage set for the opera Oedipus Rex which is touring from the Festspielhaus Hellerau (Dresden) to the Hebbel am Ufer theatre (Berlin) in March 2010.
Chiharu Shiota Chiharu Shiota (b.1972) was born in Osaka, Japan. She received her artistic education in Japan, Australia and Germany, where a particular influence on her work was her teacher, the performance artist Marina Abramovic. Upon completion of her studies at the Universität der Künste, she stayed to live and work in Berlin.
Recent solo and group exhibitions include Hayward Gallery, London (2009), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (2009), Moscow Biennale (2009), National Museum of Art, Osaka (2008), 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2008 and 2009) and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2006). Chiharu is also working as a Stage Designer. Her work is included in the collections of Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, KIASMA, Helsinki, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and The National Museum of Art, Osaka.
Jitish Kallat The Astronomy of the Subway East Galleries 15 February - 27 March
Haunch of Venison London presents an exhibition of new work by the Indian artist Jitish Kallat. Following his acclaimed exhibition at Haunch of Venison Zurich in 2008, Kallat's new work showcases the full range of his visual vocabulary incorporating video, sculptural installation, photography and the large format paintings for which he is best known. Tackling his foundational themes of sustenance, survival and mortality in the contemporary urban environment of Mumbai, Kallat offsets a vivid, hand-made aesthetic with digitised renderings of streets fit-to-burst, where the cumulative impression of daily existence is pushed to the extreme.
At the heart of the artist’s interest in the bustling metropolis lies the experience of the individual within the crowd. This is driven by a play on scale, understood in terms of a subject's physical and metaphorical presence. Across two and three dimensions, using a variety of media, and through assimilating the local with the universal, Kallat checks the twenty-first century's obsession with effects - images, food, products, even people – by repositioning them in unfamiliar environments. A large video projection shows x-rayed foodstuffs projected onto a dark celestial space and pouring into view as asteroids, stellar formations, planetary clusters and nebulae. In a sculptural installation, a miniature crowd of rioting figures scatters across the floor, their scale exaggerated by the viewer’s height, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope.
Another piece in the exhibition is an intricately treated sculpture of an oversized black lead kerosene stove that carries more than a hundred images on it. These are culled from the porch of the Victoria Terminus building which is the nerve centre of Mumbai's commuter action. Curiously, the decorative architectural friezes carry several images of animals devouring each other and clinging onto various foods. Viewed together on a single sculpture, this sprawling mass is not unlike the daily grind of survival that this porch bears witness to. In large paintings elsewhere, the body is abstracted into ink blot formations, its stretched muscles and dripping fluids becoming receptacles of urban trauma.
Undermining conventional notions of the local and universal, the micro and the macro, and the way the two infect one another, Jitish Kallat's forthcoming exhibition is a sustained meditation on the urban dwelling condition where the struggle between self-improvement and social disorder is at its most stark. The corpus of evidence Kallat presents is bound by Tristan Tzara's Dada poem, 'The Great Lament Of My Obscurity Three', which he re-presents here as a text made from bone. Its combination of the close at hand, the nonsensical and the cosmic -'let us always shuffle through the colour of the world/which looks bluer than the subway and astronomy… our legs are stiff and knock together’ - distils the world, half-here and half-there, mine yet theirs, which Kallat repeatedly evokes.
Jitish Kallat Jitish Kallat (born Mumbai, 1974) studied painting at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai and has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally. In addition to his inclusion in important museum exhibitions such as Indian Highway at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2009), Chalo! Indua: A New Era of Indian Art at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2008), Thermocline of Art – New Asian Waves at the ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe (2007) and Century City at Tate Modern in London (2001), Kallat has participated widely in biennials and triennials, including The 3rd Guangzhou Triennial in China (2008), The 5th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Australia (2006) and The 6th Gwangju Biennale in Korea (2006). Recent solo exhibitions have taken place with galleries in Beijing, London and Mumbai. Kallat’s work is held in a number of important public and private collections internationally including MOCA, Los Angeles, the Saatchi Gallery and the Frank Cohen collection.
Haunch of Venison Founded in 2002 by Harry Blain and Graham Southern, contemporary art gallery Haunch of Venison works with some of the most important and exciting artists working today, presenting a broad and critically acclaimed programme of exhibitions at international gallery spaces in London, Berlin and New York. In March 2009, Haunch of Venison moved their London programme to the 21,500ft² gallery spaces at 6 Burlington Gardens.
