Yoko Ono: Grapefruit, Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Yoko Ono: Grapefruit

Moderna Museet, Stockholm

6 June – 16 September 2012

YOKO ONO is a pioneer of conceptualism and the international Fluxus movement, and has been sharing her message of peace and love with the world for nearly 60 years. The Moderna Museet exhibition highlights Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit from 1964 and features selected instruction pieces that encourage new, imaginative ways of looking at life and creating art. For the exhibition Yoko Ono has made a new piece called Summer Dream and a new instruction piece, that some 20 artists have been invited to respond to. Moreover, Yoko Ono will realise two of her works together with the public on Djurgården in Stockholm during the full-moon night between 4 and 5 June.

Grapefruit is a seminal collection of texts, so-called instruction pieces, and has been reprinted in many editions since 1964.

“I named my first book of instructions with the name of the fruit I loved. Grapefruit is a hybrid of orange and lemon and to me, it represented East and West, the two cultures in my life which gave the instructions the power of the Universe. Have fun with it.” Yoko Ono

In the 1950s, Yoko Ono had already begun experimenting in the borderland between music, performance, poetry and visual art. She used the concert and event formats as a place where the audience was encouraged to enact her ideas, or simply to think and develop them in their own minds. With a background in classical music composition and studies in philosophy, Yoko Ono began writing “scores” for art, that is, instructions that could be interpreted again and again by audiences and colleagues. In each new context, new expressions and nuances arise, depending on who is doing it and where. Yoko Ono’s practice is therefore a unique prelude to conceptualism, which emerged in the 1960s. In an era of radical change, artists were eschewing the notion that art was primarily physical objects to be produced and consumed. They challenged the traditional art concept and began working with ideas, sounds, actions and time as artistic materials. Language became a key element.

“Grapefruit is undoubtedly one of the world’s ten best artist’s books. It has everything – humour, poetry and breathtaking, inspiring ideas. With her experimental films and instruction pieces, Yoko Ono is a unique voice in 1960s avant-garde art. And as a woman and conceptual artist, she is a strong role model for a new generation of artists”, says Cecilia Widenheim, curator of the exhibition.

One of Yoko Ono’s most famous instructions is Cut Piece from 1964, which the artist herself has performed on several occasions. The enacted situation consists of Yoko Ono sitting on a stage before an audience, with a pair of scissors in front of her, inviting the audience to cut pieces from her clothing. Filmed documentations of Cut Piece, from 1965 and 2003 and several of Yoko Ono’s legendary Fluxfilms will be shown in the exhibition at Moderna Museet. Yoko Ono’s films have a unique position in 1960s experimental film-making. Several of them are based on instructions published in Grapefruit – for instance, the film No. 1 (Match), which is based on the text Lighting Piece from autumn 1955: “Light a match and watch till it goes out.”

For the exhibition at Moderna Museet, Yoko Ono has written a new instruction, Search for the Fountain. The text has been sent to some 20 artists who have been invited to respond to the text in various ways. Search for the Fountain is a distinct example of how Yoko Ono intentionally lets the materialisation of her artistic ideas lie open to interpretation, but also how she assumes that viewers will handle and reinterpret the concept from their own perspectives. Among the participating artists are VALIE EXPORT, Tris Vonna-Michell, Julieta Aranda, Simone Forti and Emily Roysdon. 

Curator: Cecilia Widenheim

MODERNA MUSEET

Exercisplan 4, 111 49 Stockholm

www.modernamuseet.se

Mary Kelly, Moderna Museet, Stockholm - Four Works in Dialogue 1973-2010

Mary Kelly 

Four Works in Dialogue 1973-2010 

Moderna Museet, Stockholm 

16 October, 2010 – 23 January, 2011 

MARY KELLY’s work holds a seminal place in the history of contemporary art. She is best known for her large-scale installations that pose challenging questions about identity, sexuality and memory in relation to individual and collective history. Moderna Museet shows some of her most influential works, together with a new piece produced for the exhibition in Stockholm.

Four Works in Dialogue comprises Post-Partum Document (1973-79) and related work Primapara, The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi (2001), Multi-Story House (2007) and the recent piece Habitus (2010). Part V of Mary Kelly’s groundbreaking work Post-Partum Document was acquired for the Moderna Museet collection in the course of the project “The Second Museum of Our Wishes”, and in this exhibition, the complete work is being presented in Sweden for the first time.

Mary Kelly’s works are imbued with a profound interest in material process as well as language and history. Her works are a unique blend of subtly humorous personal narrative and critical analysis, often in dialogue with the women’s movement of the 1970s. Over the years, Mary Kelly’s practice has come to be a vital inspiration and reference point for many younger artists.

By showing Mary Kelly’s major projects from the 1970s together with works from the past decade, the exhibition seeks to engage us in a visual dialogue across generations that have been shaped by different cultural circumstances, but subject to the same historical events. The works in the exhibition capture the diverse voices that form our archive of collective memories, reflecting on the way past hopes and disappointments reappear in the present, and alluding to the formative role of the mother-child relationship in that process.

Mary Kelly’s groundbreaking Post-Partum Document was created over a period of six years. Documenting her son’s gradual mastery of language in the first few years of life, Kelly shows that it is a mutual process of socialisation, affecting both mother and child.

Multi-Story House is part of a larger installation, Love Songs, which visualizes Mary Kelly’s dialogue with younger women about the legacy of feminism. The walls and ceiling are constructed of plexi panels that display short anecdotal narratives about feminism. Some are the voices of Mary Kelly’s contemporaries, others, her students, but all share a common interest in the history of the women’s movement and how it has been challenged and renegotiated. Multi-Story House was created in collaboration with Ray Barrie for documenta 12 in Kassel.

In The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi the artist looks at the way language impacts the assumption of national or ethnic identity. Mary Kelly’s prose is based on a newspaper report in Los Angeles Times about the fate of an infant boy during the Balkan war in the 1990s, and describes how a fortuitous event was used by the media as a symbol of Kosovo’s fight for independence.

Habitus was created by Mary Kelly, in collaboration with Ray Barrie, for this exhibition at Moderna Museet. The structure’s shape and size are based on the Anderson Shelter, which was mass produced for home use in Britain during the Second World War. In Habitus the corrugated iron is replaced with panels of laser-cut text that become legible when they are reflected in the mirrored floor. Mary Kelly’s short, quirky narratives recount the memories of a generation born during or after the war began, marked by violent events such as the Holocaust, the war in Vietnam, or the ethnic conflict in Serbia.

 In addition to the four major projects, Moderna Museet will also be showing the film Nightcleaners (1972–75) by The Berwick Street Film Collective. Nightcleaners is a 90-minute, black and white film, which documents the lives of women who clean London offices at night and take care of children and household chores during the day. Originally intended to be used in a campaign to organise women cleaners in the Transport and General Workers Union, it developed into an influential experimental film that challenged the documentary genre.

Curator: Cecilia Widenheim

MODERNA MUSEET

Exercisplan 4, 111 49 Stockholm

www.modernamuseet.se