Chiharu Shiota: Who am I Tomorrow?

“Who am I Tomorrow?” is a new site-specific installation by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, created for the Kunstraum in Dornbirn, Austria. Chiharu Shiota isolates the human blood circulation from the systemic whole, enlarges it and inserts it into the hall structure.

In the former assembly hall, a red, entwined labyrinthine mesh hangs overhead. It takes up the entire exhibition space and as soon as we enter, we are right in the middle of it. As we look more and more closely, we recognise intertwined tubes. Suspended from the 11-metre-high ceiling on more than 5,000 red threads, the material seems not static at all, but rather in motion: through 2,500 metre-long paths in countless coils flows a red liquid. At some points, tubes break away from the compound and lead downwards, via a medical pump, into an Erlenmeyer flask.

The installation with the evocative title “Who am I Tomorrow?” by Chiharu Shiota unfolds the fascinating impression of a living, oversized and independent organism. It seems to hover above the visitors, precisely fitted into the protective historical architecture, connected to it by an uncountable number of red connecting lines.

Shiota here turns the inside out. We all live, work, sleep, love and suffer physically driven by a constantly functioning cardiovascular system. With a heartbeat of about 70 beats per minute, approximately 10,000 litres of blood are pumped into around 100,000 kilometres of blood vessels every day. Shiota isolates this blood circulation from the systemic whole, enlarges it and inserts it site-specifically into the hall structure. The function of the heart is taken over by the pumps, which move apparent blood through the veins. For a short time, the blood is even completely removed from the circulation in the Erlenmeyer flask and kept in the vessel to be fed back into the flow through the next open vein with the help of the pump. This process is similar in medicine to the out-of-body circulation accomplished with the help of a heart-lung machine and used in open-heart surgery.


More Info: HERE