Serralves devotes the weekend to Yoko Ono's artwork and features a cinema cycle

Serralves Museum features a cinema cycle devoted to the artwork by the Japanese-American Conceptual and Performance Artist and musician Yoko Ono, with the screening of seven short-films and the long-film "Imagine", on 19th and 20th September, respectively.  

This cinema cycle is held in the framework of the exhibition "The Learning Garden of Freedom" by Yoko Ono, who will be forever known as John Lennon's partner, which inaugurated last May, and will be on show at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art till 15th November.

This weekend, take the opportunity to get to know Ono's creative expression that celebrates "the body and its relation with the camera", at Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira, as stated by the press release.

The programme kicks off on 19th September with the screening of seven short films, produced between 1966 and 2012, that "sum up the variety and the complexity of films directed by Yoko Ono over the years". This cinema cycle also includes recorded performances and joint-productions with John Lennon.

The session to be screened on 20th September, the long film "Imagine", directed in 1972, portrays the lives of Ono and Lennon. The long feature takes on the documentary format, mixing fiction and reality and takes on surrealist elements to show a day in the lives of Yoko Ono and John Lennon, to the music of the FLY and Imagine albums.

The film, which was remastered in 2018 and will be show for the first time in Portugal, also includes the testimonies of friends of the couple, namely George Harrison, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, Jack Nicholson, Dick Cavett and Fred Astaire.

All cinema sessions take place at 5pm.

Yoko Ono's career spans several decades and many directions in art, and this will be the largest ever retrospective of Yoko Ono's work in Portugal.

Yoko Ono was born in 1933, in Tokyo, Japan. She later moved to the USA and stared a career in artistic experimentalism, namely conceptual art.

The exhibition "The Learning Garden of Freedom"

Those who wish to visit the exhibition will encounter a new way to shape art, with painting, music, poetry , installation, video, performances, objects and archive materials leading the journey to unveiling Yoko Ono's unique view on art, freedom, peace that summons public engagement to be complete.

Some key ideas about her work is that Ono's understanding of Conceptual Art involves the audience into the completion of the work, where anyone can be a part of it; also, Yoko Ono was one of the strongest feminist voices to emerge from the art world in the 60s. Her Cut Piece (1964), performance involved inviting audience members to take turns cutting off her clothes using a pair of scissors. This quite demonstrates Ono's pioneering force in eliminating boundaries in the art field.