The Berlin-based artist Chiharu Shiota started out as a painter but felt trapped in its traditions. “I have to make art in space,” she said in early 2019, explaining her decision to create installations in museums and galleries. And what installations! One series saw Shiota stringing and tangling thread like a Freudian spider interpreting dreams, turning rooms into scary insterstitial spaces. From red threads she created huge corporeal vaults; from black threads, frenzied synapses singed and stilled. The exhibition “State of Being,” expresses her new thinking on death. Where she once thought it meant the end of existence, she now believes “my mind can exist without my body. My brain functions separately to my body. The scientist Benjamin Libet acknowledged that the body reacts before the mind can create a thought. This controversial theory explains how I feel.” —Laura Jacobs