“Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind” spans the artist and activist’s work from the 1950s to the present day
“Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind” at Tate Modern is built on active participation — fitting, given that Ono has spent her career treating audience involvement as inseparable from the art itself. It’s the largest UK retrospective of her work to date, tracing a career that spans from the 1950s all the way to the present.
The exhibition moves chronologically, opening with Ono’s childhood in Tokyo, her family’s wartime evacuation to the countryside, and her eventual move to New York, where she began producing her earliest works. The instructional quality that defines so much of her practice was there from the start — early pieces, for instance, simply asked viewers to light a match.
Throughout “Music of the Mind,” visitors are invited to actively participate: playing a game of chess using only white pieces, removing their shoes and performing actions inside a black bag, hammering in nails, writing a message to their mother, or painting in blue across a large white canvas shaped like a ship.
The show treats Ono’s five-year stay in London, beginning in 1966, as a turning point — the moment her work took on its more radical character — and traces the relationships she built there with fellow artists, writers, and musicians, including her husband and creative partner, John Lennon. The multimedia elements of the exhibition open with 1969’s Bed Peace, documenting the couple’s famous “bed-in” and the media frenzy that followed.
The exhibition takes its name from a series of concerts and events Ono staged in London and Liverpool in 1966 and 1967, where “silent” music existed only in the minds of those listening. Sound, here, is everywhere — including anthems like “Sisters O Sisters” (1972), “Woman Power” (1973), and “Rising” (1995), all part of Ono’s long-running work addressing violence against women.