New Yoko Ono exhibition focusing on printed matter

From October 2017 to January 2018, Kunsthal Charlottenborg presents YOKO ONO TRANSMISSION, an exhibition which explores the artist’s unique ways in which she transmits her profound messages of artistic philosophy and peace through numerous ways to reach all peoples throughout the world. This exhibition was created especially for the Kunsthal Charlottenborg.

Yoko Ono has always worked for a different world of peace and understanding, and for people to be aware of their environment.  As an artist, she has used a variety of methods, including the creation of conceptual means in her art. The forms can range from conceptual instructions for paintings, photographs, and films, to records, concerts, billboards, participatory installations and events.

It is through these means that she has been able to reach individuals and great masses of people, using advertising spaces in magazines and newspapers, postcards, TV, radio, posters, record covers, books, and even sky-writing. In the late 1960s and 1970s, together with John Lennon, she did Bed-Ins for Peace, press conferences in bags, and wrote songs that questioned war and discrimination against women and all peoples.

In the exhibition YOKO ONO TRANSMISSION at Copenhagen’s Kunsthal Charlottenborg, visitors can explore more than five decades of artworks made by Yoko Ono.  From her early engagement with the international avant-garde to her collaborations with John Lennon, and an intense period of creativity from the late 1980s to today, providing an overview of her aesthetically beautiful and thought-provoking messages, produced over the course of her career.

This new exhibition at Kunsthal Charlottenborg focuses on Yoko Ono’s publications, printed matter in the widest sense, and on how the artist has been able to disseminate her work from small whispers to broadcast through mass media. The exhibition will include scans of her original typescripts for Grapefruit, an original War Is Over! poster, rare popular record sleeves (for example from the early Plastic Ono Band), flyers for exhibitions, newspaper ads, photographs of Bed-In for Peace, and Word Piece billboards throughout the world, films, participatory installations and much more. At the same time, the exhibition portrays how Yoko Ono as an avant-garde artist suddenly became part of the epicentre of popular culture.

YOKO ONO TRANSMISSION will be shown in two galleries on the first floor of the Kunsthal, and includes the staircase space as well as the elevator, where there will be sound installations. The Kunsthal’s cinema will screen a series of rare films, dating back to the early 1960s Japan, where Yoko Ono already made significant artistic contributions, which the rest of the world became familiar with throughout the 1970s.

The work Imagine Map Piece is shown in the foyer, and the exhibition continues from here into the city and extends to the rest of country in the form of posters, billboards and stamps. The concept of the exhibition is to reactivate the works once again and show them as they were originally intended. Therefore, it has been imperative for both Yoko Ono and Kunsthal Charlottenborg that the works also extend beyond the Kunsthal into the city of Copenhagen and the rest of Denmark, and by extension, the world.

YOKO ONO TRANSMISSION is curated by Jon Hendricks, Lars Schwander and Michael Thouber in collaboration with Yoko Ono.

Fakta om udstillingen
YOKO ONO TRANSMISSION
October 13 2017 – January 14 2018
Opening: Thursday October 12 from 5–8pm
Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Nyhavn 2, 1051 København K
Admission fee: 75 DKK (Free admission during the opening)
Read more about the exhibition.