This major installation touches on themes of absence and vulnerability within Shiota’s practice, and of being confronted by the enormity and complexity of existence. The work harks back to the year she spent as an art student in Australia in the 1990s, when she took the opportunity to travel the country widely. Shiota recalls visiting Uluru in central Australia and observing the vast desert plains around it, which brought to mind the planet’s circumference, the movement of the stars, and the scientific questions that once ‘deprived Galileo of his sleep’. In A question of perspective, a flurry of paper suspended in what she describes as a ‘black universe of ropes’ is intended to evoke a similar sense of mystery and wonder, while the desk and chair at its centre imply absence and emptiness.

A question of perspective 2022 was commissioned for 'The Soul Trembles', a major survey of Shiota's work curated by Mori Art Museum (Tokyo) and shown at QAGOMA in 2022.

Learn more about this work via the featured Digital Story: Chiharu Shiota: A question of perspective.