Boston
Institute of Contemporary Art Watershed
“Home Less Home,” Chiharu Shiota’s current exhibition (on view through September 1, 2025), presents a timely consideration of migration and the meaning of home. Curator Ruth Erickson, the ICA’s Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, invited Shiota to create two installations for the enormous space (one new and one re-adapted) because the artist “understands how to work at a scale that can be a real challenge.” Shiota’s focus on migration, memory, endurance, and home is also well-suited to East Boston, once the second largest point of immigration in the U.S. after Ellis Island.
Ilan Natan Magat of Israel College has said that home “can be a structure, a feeling, a metaphor, and a symbol,” and one senses the truth of that statement in Shiota’s work. Born in Osaka, she moved to Berlin in 1996 with only one suitcase. For decades, she has been making haunting site-specific installations in her signature material, which she calls “threads.” The inspiration for these other-worldly environments stems from personal experience and emotion expanded into universal understanding.
Entering the former factory space of the Watershed, viewers are immersed in an ethereal, mirage-like atmosphere, as red and black cords stream down to the concrete floor from the 23-foot-high ceilings. Shiota has explained that she often uses “red string, because it’s the color of blood,” symbolic of “family, nation, religion, survival.” In Accumulation—Searching for the Destination (2014/25), dozens of discarded vintage suitcases (found in Berlin flea markets) float through space, suspended within a matrix of red rope. Erickson calls these suitcases, which show wear and tear, “a kind of surrogate for a human story.” Subtly quivering in the air currents, they create ghostly shadows on the walls. Structurally, Accumulation suggests a staircase ascending to the ceiling; it could also be viewed symbolically as a path or journey. For Shiota, the suitcase suggests new beginnings; for many migrants, a suitcase holds an entire life’s belongings.
Moving to Germany gave Shiota an acute understanding about the early stages of adjustment often felt by immigrants. For her, “Home is like something in your heart, inside.” She brings this notion to life in Home Less Home (2025), a huge immersive configuration of red and black strings, furniture, floating pieces of paper, and objects. Black cords create the outline of a house roof against the red web woven through the space. Shiota issued an open call to residents in the area, asking them to respond to “what home means, what it feels like to leave home and what it takes to rebuild it.”
One must walk through the installation slowly in order to inspect the many suspended documents, including passports, letters, immigration papers, as well as personal stories from participants of all ages, photographs of family reunions, and drawings of homes. In total, 6,000 pieces of paper loaded with emotional testimony about displacement and fitting in flutter through the installation, their quietly powerful presence anchored by a domestic tableau of dining table and chairs, foreign currency, books, a bed, and a sewing machine. Throughout this vast installation there exists a liminal sensibility, a feeling of being on the precipice of something new but not quite there yet.
Though Shiota’s work is not intended to be overtly political, the themes pervading “Home Less Home” cannot be separated from the current U.S. administration and its attitude toward immigrants. Lost in the heated discussions over policy reform, economic impact, and cultural integration is the reality faced by immigrants themselves—for many, the migration period can involve the greatest stress, demanding adaptation and resilience as bonds are reforged, identities reshaped, and the perception of home shifted. Shiota invites visitors to think about the complexities of dislocation and the meaning of “home.” Her impeccably crafted, thought-provoking installations, with their collected memories, prompt us to consider our own histories and connections to place, and perhaps open ourselves to the stories and experiences of others.
