London Times Reviews Hayward Gallery Show

Walking in My Mind at the Hayward Gallery, London SE1
Joanna Pitman

The final room in the Hayward’s summer show, Walking in My Mind, contains an installation by a young Japanese artist, Chiharu Shiota. She is one of ten international artists invited to construct installations depicting the contents of their minds, and Shiota’s visualisation of her mental landscape is troubling.

She has filled a large room with a tangled web of black woollen threads, woven around a central group of five white dresses. The threads are densely spun, knotted in and out of one another in a spreading tangle, sticking arbitrarily to the floor and ceiling and quivering like the work of a giant malevolent spider. A narrow tunnel is left unfilled, allowing the visitor to creep around and view her thought processes, her networks of neurons and synapses from the inside.

Shiota has been creating these black webs since 1994 to exorcise her fears. She tells me that she grapples daily with powerful fears of the dark and of death, with childhood fears and anxieties about her identity and her future, and finally, with worries about losing her insecurities, which are what fire her artistic imagination. It is shocking being confronted with such tangible terror.

The curators Mami Kataoka and Stephanie Rosenthal’s concept for this exhibition came from their visualisation of the gallery as a giant head that invites visitors to wander around in the recesses of its mind. Their chosen artists — Yayoi Kusama, Charles Avery, Thomas Hirschhorn, Bo Christian Larsson, Mark Manders, Yoshitomo Nara, Jason Rhoades, Pipilotti Rist, Keith Tyson and Shiota — have constructed some intimately revealing works that allow us the privilege of creeping around inside the privacy of these creative heads.

Hirschhorn has built a giant fantasy brain, Cavemanman, out of curving tunnels and a series of chambers lined with adhesive tape in which you can explore, while physically and mentally losing your way. Inside, there is a wealth of data from Hirschhorn’s mind, philosophical books, girly pin-ups, clocks, piles of detritus in overflowing bins; and throughout there are groups of mannequins wrapped in silver foil, their brains connected with foil arteries.

Kusama, a leading figure in Japanese postwar avant-garde art, has made an installation of mirrors and balloons decorated with red and white polka dots. In this strange, hallucinatory chamber, the visitor quickly loses orientation and perhaps experiences some of the dizzying qualities of Kusama’s singular life.

This show is fascinating and illuminating, and as you emerge, you cannot help wondering how your own mind might be visualised in 3-D.

Hayward Gallery (southbankcentre.co.uk/walking), from today to Sept 6