Kunsthal Charlottenborg presents Yoko Ono Transmission. The exhibition explores the unique ways in which the artist transmits her profound messages of artistic philosophy and peace through numerous channels to reach people throughout the World.

Yoko Ono has always worked for a different world, for peace and understanding, and for people to be aware of their environment. As an artist, she has used a variety of methods, ranging from conceptual instructions for paintings, photographs, and films, to records, concerts, billboards, participatory installations and events. Using advertising spaces in magazines and newspapers, postcards, TV, radio, posters, record covers, books, and even sky-writing, she has been able to reach out to individuals as well as great masses of people. 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, the exhibition provides an overview of the 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 be 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 from around 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, with sound installations in the staircase space and the elevator. 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 important 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.