Sabancı University Sakıp Sabancı Museum (SSM) presents the most comprehensive exhibition of Yoko Ono’s work ever presented in Türkiye, realised with the support of Akbank and in collaboration with MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in León, Spain.

Opening to visitors on 25 June, Yoko Ono: Insound and Instructure presents an extensive selection from over seventy years of artistic production by Yoko Ono, whose career began in the avant-garde milieu of New York in the late 1950s. Comprising 67 works, including some of Ono’s earliest and most influential pieces. The exhibition spans many of the forms through which Ono has worked over the course of her career, from early instruction pieces and conceptual works to performance, film, installation, and participatory pieces. It highlights the breadth of an artistic practice that has made pioneering contributions across multiple disciplines.

The exhibition takes its title from the concepts insound and instructure, terms Ono introduced in 1964 that provide the conceptual framework for the exhibition. Extending throughout Sakıp Sabancı Museum and into its garden, the exhibition brings together works from across Ono’s career, inviting visitors to engage with questions of imagination, perception, participation, memory, peace, and human connection.

Suzan Sabancı, Chairman of Akbank, shared her thoughts on the exhibition Yoko Ono: Insound and Instructure as follows: “At Akbank, we carry out our corporate social responsibility activities under three main headings: entrepreneurship, education, and culture and the arts. Culture and the arts, however, have always held a special place for us. Contemporary art in particular, with its young, dynamic and constantly evolving nature, encourages people to think, question and look at the world from a different perspective. Guided by this understanding, we have been delighted to realise various projects with Sakıp Sabancı Museum since its foundation. This year, we are very pleased to present the works of Yoko Ono, one of contemporary art’s most distinctive figures, to art audiences. Extending from poetry to video, from sculpture to installation, our exhibition offers visitors a multilayered and living experience beyond a conventional museum visit. I invite all art lovers to see this special exhibition.”

Ahu Antmen, Director of Sakıp Sabancı Museum, said: “We are delighted to present Yoko Ono to our audiences as the pioneering artist she is, whose work has profoundly shaped the course of contemporary art from the late 1950s to the present. This exhibition invites us to approach Yoko Ono not through the image she holds in the popular imagination, but through her place in art history and through her contributions to numerous currents in contemporary art, from conceptual art and Fluxus to performance, feminist and participatory art.”

Connor Monahan, Director of Yoko Ono Studio and one of the exhibition’s curators, remarked: “By bringing together works from across seven decades without following a chronological narrative, the exhibition reveals something essential that runs through all of them. Whatever the medium or scale, Yoko Ono's work keeps returning to the same invitation—to enter into the work itself, to participate, and to recognize your own agency. It is an invitation that extends beyond the walls of the museum, toward connection and the possibility of change.”

Jon Hendricks, co-curator of the exhibition, said: “Yoko Ono is a damn good artist.  She uses concepts instead of a palette.  She switches from song to film, from language to installations, and always poetry.  She is an artist for the ages.”

Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya, Director of MUSAC (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León), said: “This exhibition examines the broad practice of Yoko Ono as a pioneer of performance art, experimental film and her ideas about space, architecture and installation. These provide a common thread throughout the show, as it unfolds seventy years of artistic pursuit. The exhibition is a thorough journey through Yoko Ono’s art and engages the audience through means of participation. It is an honor for MUSAC to collaborate with an influential cultural institution as Sakıp Sabancı Museum and share such a meaningful project as Yoko Ono: Insound and Instructure.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual Turkish-English catalogue, produced in collaboration with MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León. Throughout its run, the exhibition will be complemented by a public program comprising children’s workshops, performances, talks and a range of related events.

Insound and Instructure will be open to visitors from 25 June to 27 December 2026, every day except Mondays, between 10.00 and 18.00.

On Yoko Ono: Insound and Instructure

Yoko Ono: Insound and Instructure has been realised in collaboration with Yoko Ono’s Studio One, Sabancı University Sakıp Sabancı Museum (SSM), and MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, the contemporary art museum in León, Spain; with the support of Akbank. Developed together with Studio One, the exhibition has been shaped by the spatial particularities of MUSAC and SSM, as well as by the curatorial approaches of both institutions. Rather than a travelling exhibition, Yoko Ono: Insound and Instructure is the outcome of an institutional collaboration. Following its presentation at MUSAC in León from 8 November 2025 to 17 May 2026, the exhibition will be on view at SSM from 25 June to 27 December 2026.

The curatorial framework of Yoko Ono: Insound and Instructure has been developed by Jon Hendricks and Connor Monahan of Yoko Ono’s Studio One, Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya, Director of MUSAC (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León), and Ahu Antmen, Director of Sakıp Sabancı Museum.

First used by Yoko Ono in a concert and exhibition held on 20 July 1964 at Yamaichi Hall in Kyoto, Japan, the concepts of insound and instructure provide the title and conceptual framework for the exhibition. Bringing together works created over the course of Ono’s more than seven-decade career, the exhibition presents key examples from across her artistic practice, placing works from different periods and disciplines in dialogue with one another rather than following a chronological narrative.

A central point of reference in the exhibition is Grapefruit (1964), Ono’s landmark collection of instruction pieces, which includes scores written between 1953 and 1964. Using language as a medium, these works ask readers and viewers to imagine, perform, or complete the work in their own minds. The publication introduced ideas and methods that would continue to inform Ono’s work across subsequent decades and in a wide range of forms.

Among the works that emerged from this early period included in the exhibition are Draw Circle Painting (1964), Bag Piece (1964), Mend Piece (1966), White Chess Set (1966), and Skyladders (1968). Moving between instruction, object, performance, and participation, these works exemplify Ono’s early challenge to conventional distinctions between artwork and audience, extending the work beyond the object itself and into lived experience.

Extending throughout Sakıp Sabancı Museum and into its garden, the exhibition features numerous works that invite participation and contribution from the audience. These include En Trance (1990), in which visitors choose their own path through the work and into the exhibition; AMAZE (1971), a transparent labyrinth navigated through movement, perception, and discovery; Cleaning Piece (1996), which invites reflection on personal joys and sorrows; My Mommy Is Beautiful (2004), a collective expression of thoughts and feelings about mothers; Imagine Map Piece (2003), where visitors can rubber-stamp IMAGINE PEACE onto maps; Arising (2013), where women are invited to contribute written testimonies together with photographs showing only their eyes; Mend Piece (1966), where broken cups and saucers are repaired in different ways; Crickets (1997), in which visitors add their own thoughts on disasters; and Wish Tree (1996), where personal wishes accumulate over the course of the exhibition. Through these works, meaning emerges through the actions, decisions, and contributions of their participants.

Works such Riverbed (1996), Morning Beams (1997), Three Mounds (1999/2008), Invisible Flags (2015), and Invisible People (2009/2017) reflect Ono’s increasing engagement with installation and site-responsive forms from the 1990s onwards; at the entrance to the museum, there is a series of banners in Turkish and English, IT’S TIME FOR ACTION (2012). Adapted to the distinct spatial qualities of MUSAC and SSM, these works demonstrate how space itself became an increasingly important medium within Ono’s practice.

Cut Piece, first performed by Ono in Kyoto in 1964, is represented in the exhibition through documentation of both the 1965 New York performance and Paris in 2003. Presented nearly four decades apart, these performances offer a powerful reflection on the changing meanings of the work across time, while underscoring its enduring relevance. Alongside these performance works, the exhibition also includes Ono’s work in film, such as Film No. 5: Smile (1968), “RAPE” (1968), and Freedom (1970).

The exhibition is accompanied by a Turkish-English catalogue prepared in collaboration with MUSAC (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León). In addition to texts by Ahu Antmen, Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya, Connor Monahan, and Jon Hendricks, the catalogue also features several writings by Yoko Ono herself.

An exhibition spanning Atlı Köşk and the garden

At SSM, Yoko Ono: Insound and Instructure unfolds as an expansive museum experience, extending beyond Gallery -2 and Gallery -3 to the garden and the gallery housing the Arts of the Book and Calligraphy Collection in Atlı Köşk. The SSM Garden is one of the exhibition’s principal sites and will remain open throughout the summer and autumn months. Here, works such as Skyladders (1968), Wish Tree (1996), Imagine Map Piece (2003), Invisible Flags (2015) and Invisible People (2009/2017) can be experienced outdoors, beyond the gallery walls. They are presented alongside instruction-based billboard works including Imagine Peace, Fly, Dream, Yes and Have You Seen A Horizon Lately?

The gallery housing the Arts of the Book and Calligraphy Collection presents Ono’s calligraphy series Four Winds (1991/1992).

A call from Yoko Ono to visitors

As part of Insound and Instructure, Yoko Ono extends an invitation to women through her work Arising (2013). Women who have experienced violence are invited to contribute a written account of their experience together with a photograph showing only their eyes. Open to women of all ages and from all parts of the world, these submissions become part of the installation Arising, on view at the museum throughout the exhibition.

Those who wish to take part in this work as part of Insound and Instructure may participate by sending their texts and photographs either by post to Sakıp Sabancı Museum or by email to yokoono.ssm@sabanciuniv.edu

Workshops for children

Throughout the exhibition, SSM Learning Programs will also offer workshops for children. Inspired by Yoko Ono’s instruction-based artistic practice, these workshops approach art not merely as an aesthetic experience, but as a shared space of discovery and production that brings together different generations, ideas, and experiences. Inviting participants to imagine, question, and think together, the programs will offer a multilayered learning experience centred on creative participation. Through the workshops participants will reflect on peace, communication, time, imagination, and forms of expression, while finding ways to articulate their ideas through drawing, writing, and design.

Yoko Ono’s biography

Yoko Ono (b. 1933, Tokyo) is an artist, musician and activist known for her pioneering work, which has shaped the course of contemporary art, music and performance from the 1960s to the present.

Raised in Japan, with periods spent in San Francisco and New York, Yoko Ono became the first woman admitted to the philosophy program at Gakushuin University in Tokyo. She later moved to New York in 1953, where she continued her studies at Sarah Lawrence College. In 1956, she settled in Manhattan with her husband, composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. Immersed in a circle of artists and composers, Ono developed her own distinctive artistic practice, often conceived in the form of instructions that invited the viewer’s participation.

In 1960, she rented a loft on Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan, where, together with composer La Monte Young, she organised performances and events that became a significant part of the emerging New York art and music scene. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1961 at George Maciunas and Almus Salcius’ AG Gallery, featuring her Instruction Paintings, including Painting to Be Stepped On. Later that year, she gave a performance at Carnegie Recital Hall that included works involving movement, sound and voice, such as AOS – To David Tudor and A Grapefruit in the World of Park.

Ono returned to Tokyo in March 1962, where she presented new performances at the Sōgetsu Art Center, including The Pulse, and exhibited her Instructions for Paintings. Evolving from the canvases shown at AG Gallery, these works consisted solely of written instructions and, by replacing the material presence of the art object with the idea itself, marked a decisive moment in the emergence of conceptual art. Later that year, she joined John Cage and David Tudor on a concert tour across Japan. In 1964, she performed Cut Piece and Bag Piece in Kyoto and Tokyo, and self-published Grapefruit, her germinal book of instructions.

Returning to New York in late 1964, Ono continued to perform and organise events. During the same period, she developed new modes of circulation by disseminating her art through advertisements and postcard events. She also made her first films, including Film No. 4, Film No. 1 (Match) and Eyeblink / Fluxfilm No. 15.

Invited to London in September 1966 to perform and give a lecture as part of the Destruction in Art Symposium, Ono remained there for several years. She held exhibitions at Indica Gallery and Lisson Gallery, presenting new object-based conceptual works such as White Chess Set, Apple and Half-A-Room. During the same period, she continued making films, including a new version of Film No. 4 (Bottoms), and gave a series of performances as part of her concert tour Music of the Mind. At her exhibition at Indica Gallery, she met John Lennon, beginning a personal and artistic relationship that would extend across art, music and activism.

By 1969, Ono and Lennon’s peace actions, including the War Is Over! If You Want It campaign and their Bed-In for Peace in Amsterdam and Montreal, had become international news. Through these events, Ono expanded her conceptual practice into the realm of political and social imagination, transforming art into an international platform for activism.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ono and Lennon’s work centred on music, film and activism. Over a period of five years, Ono released four solo albums and four collaborative albums with Lennon, while also making several films, including Fly, Freedom, “RAPE”, Apotheosis and Imagine. In 1971, she held her first museum retrospective, This Is Not Here, at the Everson Art Museum, and also staged her unofficial conceptual exhibition Museum of Modern [F]art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 1973, Ono and Lennon announced the founding of Nutopia, a conceptual country with “no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people.” Two years later, the birth of their son Sean Ono Lennon became decisive in the couple’s withdrawal from public life. In 1980, they returned to the studio to record their first album together since 1972. Double Fantasy was released that November and won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Less than a month after its release, John Lennon was assassinated outside their home in New York.

Emerging from this loss, Ono immersed herself in music and released numerous albums throughout the 1980s. “It was the music that made me survive,” she later reflected. After a long absence from museum and gallery exhibitions, her 1989 solo exhibition Yoko Ono: Objects, Film at the Whitney Museum of American Art signaled a renewed recognition of and interest in her work.

The retrospective Yes Yoko Ono, which opened at the Japan Society Gallery in New York in 2000, travelled to thirteen international venues over four years. In 2007, Ono unveiled the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER on Viðey Island, off the coast of Reykjavik, Iceland, giving permanent form to her and Lennon’s long-standing commitment to world peace. In 2009, she received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 53rd Venice Biennale. That same year, Ono released Between My Head and the Sky, her first Plastic Ono Band album since 1973. In 2018, she released her thirteenth solo album, Warzone.

Ono’s work continues to be honored through numerous exhibitions at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2015), Tate Modern, London (2024), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2025), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2025), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in León, Spain (2025), The Broad, Los Angeles (2026) and Sakıp Sabancı Museum, İstanbul (2026).

Across a career spanning more than seventy years, Ono’s work as an artist and activist retains its singular relevance today, continually reshaping the boundaries between artist and viewer.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION

Hande Erkent Yıldız – Communications and Marketing Manager, Sakıp Sabancı Museum

Email: herkent@sabanciuniv.edu

Telephone: +90 (212) 277 22 00 – +90 533 659 50 60