Yoko Ono to bring multimedia art to India

New Delhi: A multimedia exhibition featuring public art installtions and conventional art, as also performances by Yoko Ono, wife of late Beatles icon John Lennon, will bring the New York-based artist and musician to India in January, 2012 -- the first time since Lennon`s death.

The exhibition, `Our Beautiful Daughters`, will be spread across multiple spaces. The exhibition will begin Jan 13 at two locations of the Vadehra Art Gallery in the capital. "We have been talking to Yoko Ono for the last two years. It could only materialise in 2012. She is showing in India for the first time," Parul Vadehra, director of the Vadehra Art Gallery, told IANS. "Ono will present a performance art act Jan 15... She has shown all over the world," the director of the gallery said. The artist told the media that "she has created a special art work for India - a country she respects for deep philosophy and culture". Ono has been an explorer of conceptual art and performance art. One of her milestone performance is "Cut Piece" - which was first performed in 1964 at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo. The particpatory performance starred Ono as a live art work, who knelt on the stage in a draped garment and invited the audience to cut it till she was nude. According to Ono, "it was one of many opportunities to communicate her internal agony". Yono had tried to move art out of the mounted confines to scraps of canvases to be trampled on the ground - symbolising the journey of 1960s avant garde from its ivory chamber to the streets among the people. The feminist artist married Lennon in 1969 and visited India with him. IANS