The burgeoning cultural landscape of Prague recently had an important addition to its offering of galleries, architectural heritage, and museums. In a former life, the Kunsthalle Praha building transformed electricity into the direct current that was sent across the network of cables used to power the city’s tram network. A solid 1930s building situated on the castle-side of the Vltava river it’s still quite centrally located in one of Europe’s most walkable cities, and despite being only a few minute’s walk from the tourist-packed Old Town and Charles Bridge, it still feels slightly apart from the city itself, both in location and architecture.

Its location and robust form are qualities that led it to a new life as Prague’s main gallery for 20th and 21st century art. It was a transformation carried out by local firm Schindler Seko, with considerable stripping out and reinforcement required to open up the building’s interior spaces and create new connections through and around them to create a series of galleries suitable for varying modes of work as well as the now-expected shop, café, bistro, workshops, event room, and storage.




A new narrow material palette of terrazzo floor, plaster, and both smooth and bash-hammered concrete offers raw connections to industrial heritage while offering spaces for the display of art which do not compete for attention. In its best moments, the current exhibition, Chiharu Shiota: The Unsettled Soul, presents the Japanese artists immersive works, subtly speaking to Schindler Seko’s reinvention of the space excellently, both through concealment and revealing of the architecture.

Born in Osaka in 1972, Chiharu Shiota lives between Japan and Berlin, and primarily uses thread – and a lot of it – to interject immersive environments into architectural spaces. Her intricately composed meshes and webs have seen her exhibit globally, including representing Japan at the 2015 Venice Biennale. In fact, this Kunsthalle Praha presentation runs alongside a major touring exhibition of her work which has just stopped off at Le Grand Palais, Paris, having been travelling across Asia since 2019.




Aided by a team from the Kunsthalle, Shiota meticulously weaves thread of a single colour into a complex mesh. The soft new spaces delicately spun within the harder galleries offer a meditative and contemplative experience for the visitor, only made more compelling and deeper when moving around the space. In Silent Concert, a burnt out and broken piano (destroyed during a 2002 performance work by the artist in Stuttgart) seems to be possessed and spewing out an endless black cobweb that rises to engulf the gallery space. The light filtering through casts geometric patterns across the untouched floor, while the darkness of the massed threads dances between solid black and lighter flashes as light flickers through, creating an intoxicating constellation.

Such complex networks of lines were developed by Shiota in the mid-1990s whilst studying at Kyoto Seika University, initially not as habitable spaces but as entangling and connecting objects and bodies – including the artist’s own. A few years later, the artist moved to Berlin and studied under Rebecca Horn, with clear lineage around themes of the body, psyche, and sculpture feeding into Shiota’s practice, as do ideas developed following her participation in one of Marina Abramović’s legendary and intense residential workshops.




The small Box space of the Kunsthalle presents a selection of these earlier, smaller-scale works, offering some useful deeper context to the three large room-filling installations. Many works involve the artist and her own body within performative practice, using blood, paint, and mud in intense and forceful projects exploring the psychological self and body – especially present in eight still images taken from a 2013 performance, Earth and Blood.

These still frames are hung on a wall facing a large window offering views down into another of the large installations. From here, up high, the mesh of single hanging threads creates a vertical rhythm of red through which the trace of boats can be made out lower down. The red is important, a colour the artist says speaks to the inner body, emotion, and psyche.




The work, Crossing Paths with Fate, is new and was created after the artist first encountered Prague’s river Vltava, imagining the river as a symbol of connection not only geographically, but through time, cultures, people, and lives. When wondering through the installation at ground level, the boats now above, the artist hopes the viewer will be filled with notions of hope, dreams, and potential – though these seemingly sunken boats, ghostly and distant, also invoke refugees drowning and ecological crises even if these more fearful symbols might not be overtly acknowledged by the artist.

Another a symphony of red, the last of the new installations, The Heart in your Home, presents as a literal domestic form. Formed of blocks of signature red thread webs, the whole sculpture takes the form of a pitched-roof detached home, visitors able to walk through a passage at its centre. It is a form that speaks to the experience of the artist having two homes, Japan and Germany, and the sense of inbetweenness this fuels, but it was also an aesthetic response to the pitched ceiling of Schindler Seko’s architecture.




There are poetic moments in The Unsettled Soul, not only in the intense and intricate works themselves but in how the softness of the material sits against and is connected to the hard industrial surfaces of the building. It isn’t easy to transform such a logical and ordered space of a modern art gallery into such curious, dislocating worlds that Chiharu Shiota conjures.  When at the deepest points – standing by the erupting piano, within the heart of the home, and submerged beneath the ghostly boats – the work is all-consuming, but it’s at the edges when hard and rational Kunsthalle architecture is slowly concealed by the soft dreamscapes of Shiota’s insertions that the work is at its most intriguing.