Browsing Tag

Meditation in an Emergency

Shelter

You know that feeling when you think about something and all of sudden almost everything you read or see somewhat points in that direction? It’s some sort of semantic priming, and mine has been all week around the notion of shelter. How can we find shelter against the onslaught of bad news, the overabundance of worry, the intensity of stress in our personal as well as public lives?

First thing this morning, then, was a videoclip sent from Germany. Someone declared that the current mood, across the world, is like the weather: dark, stormy, and definitely cold. He then argued we all have to be like hats, or jackets, or felt-lined boots used for exactly that weather, offering shelter against what surrounds us, providing warmth for those next to us, out in the cold. I took to that mental image – you’ll be my jacket, I’ll be your hat. Protection found in mutual caring for each other, shelter in loving kindness or chesed, as it is known as a concept in Judaism.

Next thing in my inbox was this week’s Meditation in an Emergency, focused on the need for big tents, another form of shelter. Solnit argues that during emergencies like real world catastrophes people come together to support and protect each other regardless of political or religious differences that usually keep them apart, unless they reside at the absolute extreme ends of the spectrum. The same should happen during political upheavals the likes of which we are currently experiencing. There is value in alliances, then, rather than isolation, protection through coalitions, not undermined by scorn or accusations for previous mistakes. )Although some will always barred from my tent: Republican Darren Beattie, for example, appointed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to be the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior role that represents American foreign policy to the world. Beattie has called for the mass sterilization of “low IQ trash” and feral populations. “Could offer incentives (Air Jordans, etc.).” Nerd-Reich eugenics, anyone?)

Back to sheltering tents: Here is Solnit’s paragraph that registered most with me:

Many powerful forces–the rhetoric of mainstream politics, the framing of mainstream entertainment and news, the version of therapy that reinforces individualism as it tells us we’re here to care for ourselves, end of story–tell us we are consumers, not citizens (and here I mean citizens as members of civil society, regardless of legal citizenship status). That we are here just to meet our own needs and chase our personal desires, within the realms of private relationships and material comfort and security, and that we hardly exist beyond those small realms. It says on the one hand “go have all this stuff” while it quietly discourages us to have the other stuff that is public life, participation, and power. While pretending to point us toward abundance, it deprives us of the most expansive and idealistic versions of ourselves. And most of us really are that larger self, the version that cares about justice, human rights, democracy, equality (withering all that away is a clear part of the right’s agenda at least since Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no such thing as society”).

Chiharu Shiota The Network (2024) Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme; Musée des Tapisseries and Chapelle de la Visitation, Aix-en-Provence, France. Photocredir Philippe Biolatto, Ville d’Aix-en-Provence

And then I came across a mention on ArtNet about two current exhibitions of work by an artist who is everyone’s darling these days – not mine, admittedly. Chiharu Shiota’s work has been basically repeating itself for the last 25 years, and some of her installations borrow quite a bit from other people’s ideas. But honor where honor is due: She was one of the early sculptors who integrated fiber into her work, before we saw the explosion of fiber art across the last years. And the theme of interconnectedness has been a red thread (quite literally) throughout her career. (She reserves the black threads she uses for associations to the cosmos, fate, or other intangible things that surround us.) The idea of all of us being invisibly bound together by these webs made out of thousands of threads, and the visual experience of tent-like installations hanging above our heads certainly fit into the associations that came up around the notion of “shelter.” For an introduction to her work, here is an interview with the artist, a good starting point.

Chiharu Shiota Uncertain Journey (2024) Le Grand Palais, Paris, France

Photo credit: Didier Plowy

Here are selective exhibitions still on view:

until 19.03.2025
The Soul Trembles, solo show, Le Grand Palais, Paris, France [touring exhibition]

until 20.04.2025
Between Worlds, solo show, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul, Turkey

until 28.04.2025
The Unsettled Soul, solo show, Kunsthalle Praha, Prague, Czech Republic

Chiharu Shiota The Silent Concert (2024) – Kunsthalle Praha, Prague, Czech Republic

Photocredit: Vojtěch Veškrna

until 27.06.2025
The Soul’s Journey, solo show, Fundacion Calosa, Irapuato, Mexico

As I said, she is surely en vogue. Lots of soul in the titles, lots of wool in the air. Clearly resonating with a large, international public. Maybe it is people’s fascination with the nature of webs, strong and fragile at once. Or the rudimentary desire for cocooning. Or respect for the tremendous amount of coordinated work going into these creations. Or humans’ insatiable desire for spectacle, the bigger the better. All not mutually exclusive.

I encountered her work for the first time at the Hammer museum in L.A., when she was the inaugural artist featured in the Hammer’s redesigned lobby, for the Hammer Projects 2023.

Here is an installation in a gallery in Brussels from 9 years ago, that somehow reminded me of a painting by George Tooker, the way my brain works…

Chiharu Shiota Sleeping is like Death (2016) Installation View, photo credit Gallery Daniel Templon

George Tooker Sleep II (1959)

Last year Shiota was invited to show at the Chapel of the Visitation during the Aix-en-Provence Biennial; her installation included letters from people asked to write about their experience with gratitude (does that remind you of Yoko Ono’s installations of trees and letters for peace?)

Beyond Consciousness de Chiharu Shiota - Journal Ventilo

Chiharu Shiota Beyond Consciousness (2024) Photo credit: Pierre-Nicolas Bounakoff

Maybe the idea of gratitude is another way to find shelter: a focus on what we have that is positive. It might just insulate us, if only for short moments, from the fear and disquiet instilled by the news.

Gimme Shelter, indeed… the Stones knew.