‘Yoko Ono: Dream Come True’, now open at Malba, offers us a comprehensive retrospective of Ono’s artwork, laced with an anti-war message that remains just as pertinent today.
Gathering more than 80 artworks, the multimedia exhibition ‘Yoko Ono: Dream Come True’ features film footage, video, installations, and sound recordings tracing Ono’s concept of art as a permanently evolving piece de résistance. In Ono’s own words, and in her art pieces themselves, there’s a constant struggle between permanence and change. An artwork, the multifaceted Ono seems to be telling us, is there not just for contemplation, but rather as palpable testimony of humankind’s aspiration to transcend life as we know it, and to turn our existence into a blinding, cascade of light.
After her mammoth retrospectives in Mexico City and in Lyons earlier this year, Ono and curators Gunnar B. Kvaran (Iceland) and Agustín Pérez Rubio (Spain) have put together this majestic, one-of-a-kind retrospective rightly called ‘A Dream Come True’. Always true to herself and her search for answers for the materialisation of peace, Ono’s ‘A Dream Come True’ continues to spread Ono’s anti-war posture as though the late 60s and early 70s were not over. Arguably, they are not: armed struggle is still one of the evils plaguing planet Earth and peace remains an ever elusive dream.
But Ono, unabated, continues to dream, and to transmit her vision to audiences old and new, to baby boomers, hippies, yuppies, X-ers, and millennials alike.
‘Dream Come True’, as envisaged by Ono and the curators, features the entirety of the artist’s work: visuals, music, aggiornated by such stars as Moby and DJ Tenaglia, and that intangible element known as interaction, meaning that audiences actually get to participate in any Ono event. This, by the way, is how Ono and the late John Lennon met in 1966 at an art gallery. Lennon walked in and picked an apple on the base of an installation and grabbed a bite. Unexpected, perhaps, but true to the spirit of Ono’s art, made for a different kind of permanence.
In lieu of her physical presence at the retrospective preview, Ono sent a heartfelt message to her BA audience: “…have fun and remember that you and I are creating this together… I love you.” The audience quickly reciprocated, filling every inch of available space to follow, perhaps for one time only, the work of an avant garde artist, from 1955 to this day, whose work was and remains, by definition, always ahead of her time.
Dream on.
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