Step into Yoko Ono’s immersive world at Tate Modern

‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’ at Tate Modern is an exhibition that wants you to get involved, fittingly for an artist and activist who has long considered participation to be integral to her art. It’s the thread that runs throughout the show, her largest UK retrospective, tracing her multidisciplinary work from the 1950s to date in an immersive experience that’s faithful to the instructive core at the heart of Ono’s work.

A chronological narrative takes us from Ono’s childhood in Tokyo, Japan, to her evacuation to the countryside during the Second World War and subsequent move to New York, where she conceived her first works. The instructive elements in her art are clear early on, in pieces that encouraged viewers to light a match. The idea is explored in three parts here – in the instruction itself, the performance, and the film. 

Yoko Ono at Tate Modern

This sets the pattern for the rest of the exhibition. Through her art, Ono instructs us – play chess with all-white pieces until you can’t remember where your pieces are, remove your shoes and carry out activities inside a black bag, hammer a nail, add colour to a white boat in a reflection of displacement, write a message to your mother – and as visitors to the exhibition, we can faithfully obey.

The exhibition lingers on Ono’s five-year stay in London, from 1966, as a turning point in the radical nature of her work, tracing the connections she made with artists, writers and musicians, including husband and collaborator John Lennon. A multimedia approach invites us in, from 1969 film Bed Peace, showing the couple’s second ‘bed-in’ event, and the resulting media scourge that ensued. 

The exhibition takes its name from Ono’s concerts and events in London and Liverpool in 1966 and 1967, where ‘silent’ music reigned, present only in listeners’ minds. Here, music is everywhere, including anthems Sisters O Sisters (1972), Woman Power (1973) and Rising (1995), supporting Ono’s work for violence against women in a multisensory mash-up.

‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’ at Tate Modern, London, 15 Feb – 1 September 2024

tate.org.uk