This Saturday, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León (MUSAC) inaugurates Yoko Ono. Insound and Instructurethe sample more extensive dedicated in Spain to the Japanese artist in the last ten years.
The figures are astonishing: it occupies 1,700 m² of the museum and brings together 80 works that cover six decades of artistic practice: from instructions conceptual and performance to experimental cinema, music and participatory projects, of which Ono is a pioneer.
The opening comes preceded by a public activation with performances historical as Cut Piece (1963) y Heaven Piece for Jesus Christ (1965) scheduled at the museum on Friday, November 7 as a prelude to the official start on Saturday.
Insound and Instructure focuses on one of Ono’s most influential contributions: the work by instructions —short texts that invite you to imagine, execute or complete an action—, germ of many of his pieces and his famous book Grapefruit (Pomelo), of 1964.
The exhibition takes a transversal look throughout his work and the different techniques that Ono has worked on. Without being a retrospective, it proposes a very complete tour that brings us closer to his figure.
Yoko Ono. Insound and Instructure. View of the exhibition at the MUSAC, Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León, 2025. Photography: MAS Image © Yoko Ono.
From there, the route unfolds movies, actions, facilities y open projects that have defined his work since the sixties: Fluxusthe dematerialization of artthe interaction with the public and a commitment peaceful y feminist sustained over time.
Among the key works that help take the pulse of the ensemble are the historical Sky TV / TV to watch the sky (1966-67), one piece closed circuit pioneer which brings a live broadcast of the sky over the building into the room.
Yoko Ono. Insound and Instructure. View of the exhibition at the MUSAC, Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León, 2025. Photography: MAS Image © Yoko Ono.
Arising (2013–ongoing), is a global appeal in which women send testimonies of violence suffered along with a photograph of their eyes to be shown at each venue, which grows with each presentation. Both condense Ono’s conceptual and political arc: from the minimal and poetic gesture to direct and participatory denunciation.
The project in León is signed by Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya -director of MUSAC- along with Jon Hendricks and Connor Monahan, key figures in the study and in the recent edition of Ono’s work.
Hendricks and Monahan have been responsible, among others, for the catalog and roaming of Yoko Ono. Music of the Mind (Tate Modern, Neue Nationalgalerie, MCA Chicago), the great international retrospective whose first stop was in 2024 at the Tate that has revalidated Ono’s centrality in the history of contemporary art.
The MUSAC sample is inserted into that constellation of recent readings and proposes its own assembly, adapted to the architecture of the Leonese museum.
The inauguration will be on Saturday, November 8, with the presence of the curatorial team. The MUSAC confirms the exhibition among its great bets of the 2025 programcoinciding with the 20th anniversary of the institution.
Yoko Ono. Insound and Instructure. View of the exhibition at the MUSAC, Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León, 2025. Photography: MAS Image © Yoko Ono.
The exhibition also comes after a cycle of great public visibility of the museum: the previous great exhibition of Ai Weiwei reached 100,400 visitors, far exceeding the museum’s average in previous years.
Furthermore, this exhibition has generated a economic impact of 33 million euros in the city. High expectations and focus on cultural tourism: this is how the event from November to May is read from the local ecosystem.
Yoko Ono (Tokyo, 1933) is a pioneer of concept art and the performance associated with the orbit Fluxus since the fifties and sixties. His work has expanded the boundaries between idea and object, artist and audience, poetry and actionassembling East and West: ritual and Zen, yes; but also political criticism, humor and games.
Insound and Instructure proposes reading this complexity with a broad approach—from instructions to activism—and highlights its relevance, which has returned it to the center of the international museum debate.
Yoko Ono. Insound and Instructure. View of the exhibition at the MUSAC, Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León, 2025. Photography: MAS Image © Yoko Ono.
In the curatorship, the presence of movies key in its collaboration with John Lennon (as Rape o Fly), attention to your participation pieces —repair, write, look, imagine—, and the constancy of a poetics of the cielo y peace that runs through all his work.
For the uninitiated visitor, the exhibition offers the best entry point; For those who already know Ono, the opportunity to see them reunited essential conceptual cores in a single expositional gesture.