This year’s Lions for lifetime achievement went to Yoko Ono and John Baldessari. Next to the prize, the Bevilacqua la Masa Foundation hosts the solo exhibition, Yoko Ono’s “ANTON’S MEMORY”.
Ono, known since the first half of the 1960s - a conceptual artist and one of the founders of Fluxus, as well as an avant-garde performer - has created an exhibition that sets out to provide a vast “fresco” of her artistic practices.
The title of the show, ANTON’S MEMORY, reflects “a woman’s life we see only through her son’s eyes - his faded memory.” as Yoko Ono herself says.
The exhibition has been designed especially for the rooms of Palazzetto Tito and is a series of new installations that incorporate some earlier works as points of reference. It includes films, sound compositions, sculptures, and drawings, as well as a number of interactive installations. There will also be elements to do with the corporeal and the sense of touch: for example, Ono’s sculpture “touch me III,” containing fragments of the female body, as if crammed into a simple chest of drawers. At the centre of the display, two filmed versions of her 1964 performance work “Cut Piece,” from 1965 and 2003, will be shown. In this work, the artist lets the public cut away parts of her clothing little by little. In the first version Yoko Ono is thirty-two years old, and in the second version she is seventy, giving a sense of the marks left on us by the passing of time. Military helmets from the Second World War with pieces of sky inside; the film of a woman desperately attempting to free herself from her bra (a metaphor for women’s liberation); an insistent coughing sound; tables, pens and paper for whoever wants to write their own thoughts and leave a trace of them; the book of recipes for artistic actions, “Grapefruit” (1964), left lying around like a generative element for all the rest; tables for playing all-white chess in peace and quiet, in the main chamber of a Venetian chamber between lancet windows opening onto nature or closed with coloured glass… all this and much more, along with a moving soundtrack, will complete the exhibition, punctuated also by the hand of the artist, who will write new pieces directly on the walls.
The entire exposition in the rooms of Palazzetto Tito will constitute a unitary whole evoking “ANTON’S MEMORY”; something that may be looked on as a codified memory, i.e. the story of an adult son rethinking through the existential vicissitudes of his mother through symbols and objects.
In the words of the curator of the project, Nora Halpern: “ANTON’S MEMORY reflects Yoko Ono’s ideas of universal inter-connectedness and the temporal realm that we all inhabit. Through her installation at the Palazzetto Tito, as well as related works throughout Venice and in the main performance hall of the Teatro La Fenice, Yoko Ono seeks to evoke memories that are simultaneously overtly personal yet evocative of collective desire and a communal connection.” An artist’s book, Other Rooms, will be published on the occasion of “ANTON’S MEMORY,” serving as a lasting extension of the exhibition. There will also be a brochure with texts by the curator Nora Halpern as well as Angela Vettese, President of the Foundation.
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