Chiharu Shiota

This Japanese performance and installation artist, who calls Berlin home, makes a specialty of creating all-encompassing environments that seem to hover somewhere between pleasant dream and nightmare—grand pianos, for instance, ensnared in dense webs of black thread, as if a giant, classical-music-loving spider had happened upon them. Old window frames salvaged from construction sites and abandoned buildings in the former East Berlin are another favored material, which the artist stacks sometimes into cathedral-like structures lit from within. She brings one of them to New York for this show.