Chiharu Shiota’s installations are an invitation to reflect on life’s fleeting nature and the invisible complexity of human relationships. Stretched to fill her spaces with an entanglement of interlocking strands, wool thread, in white, red, or black, is the primary medium of the Japanese artist. Intuitively weaving the wool on a magnificent scale, she often incorporates familiar objects such as shoes, photographs, beds, and rowboats to achieve sprawling installations that envelop the viewer – the threads, symbolizing the connection between humanity and the universe.

In this episode of Meet the artists, Shiota welcomes Art Basel inside her Berlin studio, and the inner workings of her process. Here, she details the catastrophic blow of her cancer diagnosis, which came just one day after the news she was to host a major exhibition in Tokyo that would be her biggest to date. Preparing the body of work alongside her treatment, Shiota tapped into a certain strength that continues to thread itself through her installations, channelling confrontations with her own mortality into an ongoing obsession with life and loss.

Delving into the symbolic power of string as a metaphor for the passage of time and interconnectedness, she observes the way in which the threads act as support for the objects suspended among them, just as connection suspends the memories and emotions collected through life. Developing a portrait of the artist as storyteller, the film traces the multifaceted narratives spun through Shiota’s work, exploring the tangibility of memories, and the emotional and philosophical ties that feed an archive heavy with personal depth and experience.