YOKO ONO – EX IT
curated by Jon Hendricks
Palazzo della Ragione
Padova, Piazza delle Erbe
September 7, 2024 - January 6, 2025
Orario: 9-19, chiuso il 25 e 26 dicembre 2024, 1 gennaio 2025
The art of Yoko Ono comes to Padua with one of her most emblematic and evocative installations and the city welcomes her in the splendid Hall of the Palazzo della Ragione, a UNESCO heritage site. In Padua Yoko Ono presents Ex It, a site-specific installation already exhibited in numerous international museums from 1997 to today, composed of 100 wooden coffins of different sizes with olive trees growing from the inside as a metaphor for the resilience of life and the vitality of nature. A way to talk about peace, and tell the story of life through the tragedy of death. The exceptionality of the Padua exhibition lies in the fact that it was while visiting the Hall of the Palazzo della Ragione that Yoko Ono first thought of doing the work there. The artist says:
I had an occasion to visit Padova in Italy. There I was taken to an old stone building, which was built many centuries ago. Palazzo della Ragione: built 1218. Without any explanation, a man took me to the gallery on the second floor. A huge ball room like space spread before me. Suddenly, in my vision, I saw many people lined up hung in the room. What was happening? Just then, the person who took me there explained to me that this was a room where they performed executions. It was not a ball room. I saw many, many coffins of men, women and children filling the room. Eventually, trees grew from each one on the coffins. The trees then became a forest. Birds were singing all around… and I started to cry. That’s how this piece was born. It is the memory of every race, every country. It is the memory of genocide: the pain, the horror and the healing. The dead wanted us to remember, I think. Our tears shall help heal the memory.”
For the Councilor for Culture Andrea Colasio “this is an extraordinary opportunity to bring together an installation rich in meaning, of constant and renewed relevance precisely because of the universality of its themes, with the city’s civic monument par excellence, and with an extremely evocative fresco cycle that is part of the UNESCO World Heritage List The 14th Century Fresco Cycles of Padua. It is also confirmation of an increasingly convinced interest in promoting contemporary art in Padua.”
The exhibition comes from an idea by Paolo De Grandis, whose desire was to bring Ex It to Palazzo della Ragione. The collaboration between Yoko Ono and De Grandis began in 2002 in Venice during the OPEN exhibition and has developed over the years with numerous site-specific projects. The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Paolo De Grandis, to his commitment as a curator, to his enlightened vision and to his extraordinary ability to create connections between artists, artworks and places.
Ex It is curated by Jon Hendricks and realised with the contribution of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e Rovigo and the support of the Padua Chamber of Commerce, the Padua Tourism Promotion Consortium, AcegasApsAmga, with the collaboration of the FSP Police Union. The organisation is curated by Carlotta Scarpa with PDG Arte Communications. L’organizzazione è curata da Carlotta Scarpa with PDG Arte Communications.
Yoko Ono (born in 1933 in Tokyo) is an artist of international importance: she received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. She began her career in the avant-garde art scene in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, where she established herself in the field of conceptual art, creating performances, music, films, sculptures and installations. At the beginning of her career, she worked closely with the founder of the Fluxus movement, George Mačiūnas. His work is strongly political and social.
