Insound and Instructure
MUSAC, Museo the Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, presents the most extensive exhibition of Yoko Ono (Tokyo, Japan, 1933) in Spain in the last decade. Under the title Yoko Ono: Insound and Instructure, the show celebrates the significance and impact of the work of this pioneering artist of conceptual and relational art, film and performance, musician and world peace activist.
Featuring over 80 works, the exhibition allows visitors to experience Ono’s creations from the 1960s—many of which are included in the historic publication Grapefruit (1964)—to the large-scale installations she developed from the 1990s onwards. The title of the exhibition originates from a Yoko Ono concert and exhibition that took place on July 20, 1964 at Yamaichi Hall in Kyoto. Both terms refer to the way in which Yoko Ono integrates sound and instruction into her artistic practice. The starting point of many of Ono's works lies in the Instructions, text-based works that invite the reader to imagine, experience, perform, or complete the piece. Ideas, rather than materials, are the main component of the artist’s practice.
The exhibition showcases a range of media Yoko Ono has worked with, including performance, film, music, installation, painting, and photography, exploring key themes throughout her career: the power of imagination, her activism for peace, her subtle sense of humor and absurdity, her commitment to women’s roles in society, and the presence of nature in her works.
Among the selected works are some of her most recognized pieces, including iconic works from the 1960s such as Cut Piece (1964), Voice Piece for Soprano (1961) and Draw Circle Painting (1964), that requires audience participation to be completed. This audience involvement in some of her work is one of the distinctive features that define her creation. Among the participatory works visitors can experience are AMAZE (1971), a maze that can be walked through, and En Trance (1990), an architectural structure that serves as a prelude and entrance to the exhibition, embodying notions of transformation and play.
The exhibition at MUSAC is not only a unique opportunity to access the artist's historical works, but also features some of her most recent projects, such as the installation DOORS (2011) and INVISIBLE FLAGS (2015), which reiterates pacifism as one of her core concerns.
Yoko Ono: Insound and Instructure also includes a broad selection of her films, some of which were made with John Lennon, including “RAPE” (1968), FLY (1970/1971) and Freedom (1970).
In the words of Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya, MUSAC’s director and co-curator of the exhibition “Yoko Ono is an artist whose impact on the history of contemporary art continues to grow as we come to understand the influence she has had on subsequent generations. Insound and Instructure allows visitors to immerse themselves in a creative universe that defies categorization and challenges the boundaries between artist and audience.”
Yoko Ono: Insound and Instructure will be open until May 17, 2026 and is curated by Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya, Jon Hendricks and Connor Monahan. The exhibition is co-organized with Sabancı University Sakıp Sabancı Museum (Istanbul, Turkey).
