Home is where the art is

2025 ICA Watershed exhibition examines migration, memory and home

Two large-scale, immersive installations by Chiharu Shiota anchor the 2025 season at the ICA Watershed in East Boston. The artist collaborated with local residents to probe themes of migration, memory, survival and home in a timely and moving exhibition, her first solo presentation in New England.

“Chiharu Shiota: Home Less Home” is marked by the color red. Both of the two installations making up the exhibition feature thousands of red threads hanging from the ceilings of the industrial space all the way down to the concrete floor.

Chiharu Shiota PHOTO: SUNHI MANG

“Shiota’s awe-inspiring installations address themes of migration and home that resonate meaningfully with the Watershed’s location in East Boston and beyond,” says Ruth Erickson, the ICA’s Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs. “She uses common materials to imbue her work with profound and personal connections.”

Visitors are first greeted by “Accumulation — Searching for the Destination,” a 2014 piece reimagined for the large scale of the Watershed. Amidst the red threads, battered suitcases create an ascending staircase. Some bob and weave like a turbulent plane, others stand strikingly still. The installation channels the vibrating anticipation of travel and movement to a new place. For many migrants, a suitcase can hold an entire life. Shiota herself only brought one suitcase with her when she moved from Japan to Berlin in 1996.

Chiharu Shiota, Home Less Home (detail), 2025. Installation view, Chiharu Shiota: Home Less Home, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2025. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

From there, art lovers walk into and through “Home Less Home,” a brand-new piece designed specifically for this exhibition. Black threads create the outline of a roof and a house against the field of red. Viewers walk through this house and see furniture items such as a dining table and chairs, a bed, a sewing machine and more, surrounded by suspended pieces of paper.

Boston residents contributed many of these papers, primarily residents of the East Boston neighborhood surrounding the Watershed. Some are Shiota’s own. The papers are passports, family photos, letters, immigration paperwork and written memories of journeys from one place to another, from one life to another. Here, viewers can catch glimpses of Boston’s most diverse communities. There are artifacts from Roxbury, East Boston, Jamaica Plain and more.

The exhibition is on view through September 1 at the ICA Watershed. Admission to the Watershed is free. The ICA also offers a water shuttle from the Watershed location to the central ICA building in the Seaport. Use of the water shuttle is included in a general admission ticket to the main ICA.

Shiota’s work begs the question, what constructs a home? The physical space, the memories, the people in it? In “Home Less Home” there are many threads that make up a home and many threads that connect people who have migrated to a new place. In a moment of deep fear and instability for immigrant communities, the exhibition strikes a moving chord.