Tate Modern to explore the life of Yoko Ono in huge exhibition

Opening in February 2024, Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind will trace the development of her work and its impact on contemporary culture.

The exhibition will bring together more than 200 works including instruction pieces and scores, installations, films, music and photography, which is said to showcase ’a radical approach to language, art and participation that continues to speak to the present moment’.

The exhibition will run until 1st September 2024.

What to look out for on a visit

The exhibition will start by exploring Ono’s ‘instruction pieces’ – written instructions that ask readers to imagine, experience, make or complete the work. 

Previously unseen photographs will show Ono’s first ‘instruction paintings’ at her loft studio 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.

The heart of the exhibition will chart Ono’s radical works created during her five-year stay in London from 1966. Here she became embedded within a countercultural network of artists, musicians and writers, meeting her future husband John Lennon.

Key installations from Ono’s exhibitions at Indica and Lisson Gallery will also feature, including Apple (1966), as well as Half-A-Room (1967).

The artist’s banned Film No. 4 (Bottoms) 1966-7 which she created as a ‘petition for peace’ will be displayed alongside material from her talk at the Destruction In Art Symposium.

As well as other paintings and unique objects, the exhibition will culminate in a new iteration of Ono’s participatory installation My Mommy Is Beautiful, first realised in 2004, featuring a 15-metre-long wall of canvases to which visitors can attach photographs of their mother and share personal messages.