This summer, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens the 2025 Watershed season with Chiharu Shiota: Home less home, on view May 22 through September 1, 2025. The exhibition features two large-scale installations by the Berlin-based, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (born 1972 in Osaka, Japan), including the debut of a new commission made for the ICA Watershed. Shiota foregrounds universal stories of migration, home, connection, memory, and survival. Her signature approach combines intricate, immense, and web-like installations built of thread and rope with quotidian objects—such as shoes, suitcases, beds, chairs, dresses, and keys—that serve as symbols for human presence and memory. Chiharu Shiota: Home Less Home amplifies the ICA Watershed as a unique space for public art in Boston and will be included as part of the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial. The exhibition is the artist's first solo presentation in New England and is organized by Ruth Erickson, the ICA’s Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Brianne Chapelle, Curatorial Department Coordinator.

“Shiota’s awe-inspiring installations address themes of migration and home that resonate meaningfully with the Watershed’s location in East Boston and beyond,” said Erickson. “She uses common materials to imbue her work with profound and personal connections. We are honored to be able to invite Boston audiences to participate by sharing an image or story of their personal experiences of leaving one home and finding another, adding another meaningful dimension to this important exhibition.”

Visitors to the exhibition will first encounter the installation Accumulation – Searching for the destination (2014/2025), which the artist has adapted to fill the monumental scale of the Watershed space. In this powerful work, dozens of vintage suitcases are suspended from red rope, some vibrating and shaking with the turbulence of anticipation. For Shiota, who brought only one suitcase when she moved from Japan to Berlin in 1996, the suitcase symbolizes the starting point of a new journey.

The exhibition then leads to the artist’s newly commissioned work, Home less home. Within a field of red and black ropes forming the shape of a house in space, Shiota suspends thousands of documents, including those contributed by local Boston participants. These passports, letters, photographs, immigration papers, and messages hover above vignettes of domestic furniture selected and arranged by Shiota.

For her new work, Shiota invites individuals to share stories and images of what home means, what it feels like to leave home, and what it takes to rebuild it. The collection of personal images and stories will take place in the spring of 2025 through partnerships with local community organizations and an open call to East Boston residents from the artist and ICA. Together, these works consider the journey towards one home and away from another.

Chiharu Shiota: Home less home will be included as part of the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial, the city’s first and only public art event set to run every three years from May to October.