YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND

About the Exhibition

Since the 1950s, Yoko Ono has been ahead of her time, leaving her mark on visual arts, music and activism. Honouring her visionary, sensitive and humorous approach to visual art and music, Gropius Bau presents YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND. This comprehensive survey exhibition celebrates the groundbreaking work of Yoko Ono and highlights her position within early conceptual and participatory art, film and performance. The show brings together over 200 works, including instruction pieces and scores, installations, films, music and photography. These artworks reveal Ono’s radical approach to language, art and audience participation, a sensibility that continues to speak to the present moment. The exhibition takes its title from Ono’s Music of the Mind series of concerts and events in London, Liverpool and elsewhere in 1966 and 1967. Ono notes, “The only sound that exists to me is the sound of the mind. My works are only to induce music of the mind in people … In the mind-world, things spread out and go beyond time.” (1966)
 
YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND traces the development of the artist’s innovative work from the mid-1950s to now, as well as its enduring impact on contemporary culture. Spreading across the first floor of Gropius Bau, the atrium – which is open to the public free of charge – and other parts of the building, the artist’s work will extend into the city and its public spaces, kicking off a season of Yoko Ono-centred exhibitions and events. The exhibition also features an extensive programme that explores Yoko Ono’s work from various perspectives.

“YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND is a perfect continuation of our new programme, which aims to transform Gropius Bau into a space for everyone. Yoko Ono’s playful and participatory approach holds the potential for unique encounters with art and one another. Her works, while often simple and intuitive on the surface, can be simultaneously complex, intellectually stimulating and deeply political. To give this outstanding artist the recognition she deserves, we are excited to collaborate with Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) and the Neue Nationalgalerie to expand her art across the city of Berlin.”
— Jenny Schlenzka, Director of Gropius Bau
 
"Because, first, there’s an idea, and then we imagine that idea as a reality. Through the imagination, things do become reality – a physical reality.” — Yoko Ono, 2009
 
Ideas are central to Ono’s art, often expressed in poetic, humorous and profound ways. The exhibition highlights her pivotal role in experimental avant-garde circles in New York and Tokyo, including the development of her “instruction pieces” – written instructions that guide readers to imagine, experience, make or complete the work. Some exist as a single verb, such as “FLY” or “TOUCH”. Others range from short phrases like “Listen to a heartbeat” and “Step in all the puddles in the city”, to tasks for the imagination like “Painting to be constructed in your head”. At Gropius Bau, visitors are welcomed to the exhibition with The Blue Room Event (1966), a collection of simple sentences in Yoko Ono's handwriting spread throughout the room. Each word or phrase aims to stimulate and unlock the mind of the viewer, encouraging them to question their perception of the world.
 
Ono chooses different forms for her instructions: in this exhibition, previously unseen photographs and related archival material introduce Ono’s first Instruction Paintings (1960–61) at her loft studio on 112 Chambers Street in New York – where she and composer La Monte Young hosted experimental concerts and events – and in her first solo exhibition at AG Gallery in 1961. A typescript draft of Ono’s groundbreaking self-published artist book Grapefruit (1964), compiling her instructions written between 1953 and 1964, will be displayed in its entirety.
 
Visitors are invited to activate Ono’s instructions, exchanging handshakes with strangers in Painting to Shake Hands (1961/2025), concealing themselves in the interactive work Bag Piece (1964/2025) – first performed by Ono in Kyoto, during the same concert in which she debuted her iconic work Cut Piece (1964) – or bringing their shadows together in Shadow Piece (1963/2025).
 
“I wanted to give an unfinished work for others to add to, not to merely repeat . . .” — Yoko Ono, 2001
 
In 1966, Yoko Ono moved to London, where she ended up staying for five years. This is where she became embedded within a countercultural network of artists, musicians and writers (as she had been in New York and Tokyo), meeting her future husband and longtime collaborator John Lennon. Key installations from Ono’s influential exhibitions at Indica and Lisson Gallery are featured here, including Apple (1966), Ceiling Painting (1966) and the artist’s poignant installation of halved domestic objects, Half-A-Room (1967). Ono’s banned FILM NO. 4 (“BOTTOMS”) (1966–67), which she created as a “petition for peace”, will be displayed alongside material from her influential talk at the Destruction in Art Symposium, in which she described the fundamental aspects of her participatory art: event-based, engaged with the everyday, personal, partial or unfinished; a catalyst to creative transformation, existing within the realm of the imagination. Visitors will also be able to participate in White Chess Set – a game featuring only white chess pieces and a board of white squares, with the instructions to “play as long as you can remember where all your pieces are” – a work first realised in 1966 that demonstrates Ono’s anti-war stance.
 
“We can change ourselves with feminine intelligence and awareness, into a basically organic, noncompetitive society that is based on love rather than reasoning.” — Yoko Ono, 1972
 
Key themes that recur throughout Ono’s work are explored across decades and mediums. This includes the sky, which repeatedly surfaces as a metaphor for peace, freedom and limitlessness. As a child fleeing Tokyo during World War II, Ono found solace and refuge in the constant presence of the sky. Here, it appears in the instruction piece Painting to See the Skies (1961) and the installation SKY TV (1966/2025), which will be activated here to broadcast a live video feed of the sky above Gropius Bau.
 
The artist’s commitment to feminism is also tangible throughout her artistic practice, ranging from Ono’s earlier works, such as the performance Cut Piece, as well as key films including FLY (1970–71), in which a fly moves over a naked woman’s body while Ono’s vocals chart its journey, and Freedom (1970), depicting Ono as she attempts and fails to break free from her bra. “RAPE” (1968-69), one of the artist’s most unsettling films, documents a female protagonist as she is pursued from the street into her apartment, forcing viewers to become voyeurs and witnesses of violent power dynamics between the person filming and the person being filmed.
 
Ono’s works that denounce violence against women are amplified by a listening section devoted to her music, which features feminist anthems such as Sisters O Sisters (1972), Woman Power (1973) and Rising (1995), songs that embolden women to build a new world, “have courage” and “have rage”.
 
Framed by later performances by Ono such as Cut Piece (1964/2003) and WHISPER (2013), as well as the sound piece Will I (1995), the exhibition culminates in a new iteration of Ono’s participatory work My Mommy ls Beautiful, first realised in 2004. In an expansive installation that fills the entire room, visitors can leave photographs of their mothers and share personal messages. Besides being a temporary monument to those we call mothers, this work also speaks to the shift from having a mother to being a mother. Yoko Ono’s feminist and activist later works reflect on her personal experiences to provoke thoughts and reactions towards themes like motherhood, aging and the transience of life, where notions of hope, power and loss come to the fore.
 
“The job of an artist is not to destroy but to change the value of things. And by doing that, artists can change the world into a Utopia where there is total freedom for everybody.” — Yoko Ono, 1971
 
Ono has increasingly used her art and global media presence to advocate for peace and humanitarian campaigns, initially collaborating with her late husband John Lennon. The billboard campaign WAR IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT (1969) used the language of advertising to spread a message of peace. The film BED PEACE (1969) documents the second of the couple’s “bed-in” events staged in Montreal, during which they spoke with international media to promote world peace during the Vietnam War. Gropius Bau will also show Ono’s recent participatory installation Add Colour (Refugee Boat), first activated in 2016, inviting visitors to add colour to a boat, gallery walls and the floor whilst reflecting on urgent issues of crisis and displacement.
 
In Gropius Bau’s atrium, a banner from Ono’s ongoing PEACE is POWER campaign (2017/2025) will greet visitors alongside Ono’s Wish Tree installation (1996/2025). Wish Tree for Berlin is an open invitation to visitors to write their wishes for peace on small pieces of paper and tie them to the branches of a tree. In this installation, nine Wish Trees are presented in Gropius Bau’s atrium, which is open to the public, alongside places to sit, write and rest. Here, viewers are given space to contemplate peace as a positive and driving force. After the exhibition, the wishes will be collected and returned to the artist where they continue on in connection with her work IMAGINE PEACE TOWER in Iceland.
 
“I love Berlin and have already been here so many times. Berlin is part of my body!”
— Yoko Ono, 2013
 
Yoko Ono has a special relationship to Berlin, a city she once described as “a place where people understand my art” (2010). For her 80th birthday in 2013, Ono chose to celebrated on stage with the Plastic Ono Band at the Volksbühne that she chose explicitly “because of Bertolt Brecht” (2013). In line with the versatility and generosity of her practice, Ono’s works will spread beyond Gropius Bau for a veritable Season of Yoko Ono in Berlin: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) presents the work TOUCH (1962/2025) by Yoko Ono in the context of its n.b.k. Billboard series (located at the intersection of Friedrichstraße and Torstraße), while on the occasion of YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND, the Neue Nationalgalerie presents YOKO ONO: DREAM TOGETHER, focusing on ideas of togetherness in Ono’s work and the artist’s activism for peace.

 

About Yoko Ono

Over the next decade, she would go on to live and work in Tokyo, New York, and London, developing her visionary practice in art, performance, music and film, with iconic works including Cut Piece and her foundational book of instructions, Grapefruit (both 1964), as well as FILM NO. 4 (“BOTTOMS”) (1966-67), and FLY (1970-71) (film and album). 
By 1968, Ono began collaborating in art, music and peace activism with her partner and husband John Lennon.
As a singer and songwriter, Ono has released 13 solo studio albums and nine collaborative albums, including the 1981 Grammy Award-winning Album of the Year, Double Fantasy.
 
Ono’s work continues to be honoured with numerous exhibitions in some of the world’s most prestigious international venues, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2015), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2015), MAC Lyon (2016), Tate Modern in London (2024) and many others.  

 

YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND is organised by Tate Modern, London, in collaboration with Gropius Bau, Berlin, and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
 
The exhibition is curated by Patrizia Dander, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs, Gropius Bau and Juliet Bingham, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern; with Sonja Borstner, Assistant Curator, Gropius Bau and Andrew de Brún, Assistant Curator, International Art, Tate Modern.
 
On the occasion of YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND, from 11 April through 24 September 2025, the Neue Nationalgalerie presents YOKO ONO: DREAM TOGETHER.
Concurrently, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) presents the work TOUCH by Yoko Ono from 2 March through 31 August 2025 in the context of its n.b.k. Billboard series.

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