My Australian Journey 2022 #4 #ShiotaGOMA

This post is dedicated to an amazing exhibition we saw at GOMA (Gallery of Modern Art) on Brisbane’s South Bank.

Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota presented ‘ The Soul Trembles’ – an astonishing collection of artworks and installations with the power to change the way you see the world.

The first installation put these ideas into my head: ‘ We are all little boats of dreams suspended by myriad black threads: and we all have different ideas of who’s holding the threads‘.

Little boats of dreamsBurnt piano in a cave of closely woven black threads

I loved the burnt piano: it has so many stories to tell, so many lives within it, so much music forever held in its grasp.

Another favourite was: two white dresses surrounded once more by a complex network of black threads, enclosed within an arrangement of invisible one-way mirrors. To me this seemed a living representation of ‘Transcendental Realism’ – look it up to see what it means, and you’ll probably be none the wiser! This installation was a perfect blend of The Real, the Actual and The Empirical.

Another installation showed many white sheets of paper twisting, twirling, streaming upwards from an empty desk. Were these ideas fountaining upwards or pouring down?

Stream of ideas

Other installations too involved these mesmerising, mind-twisting black threads which seemed to simmer as you gazed.

Then we entered a world of crimson.

I loved a project where the artist asked a group of 10 year old German schoolchildren questions about ‘the soul’. Several monitors showed their answers on video: beguiling, funny, inspirational touching, penetrating, fresh, astonishing.

The soul: what is it?

Finally, I was enchanted by these airborne oscillating suitcases: