Join History of Art for the next in the Research Seminar Series chaired by Professor Patricia Allmer.

This lecture will be hybrid. Please book your ticket for attendance in person or online. Further details on how to access the lecture will be sent to you following booking.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Higgitt Gallery.

Yoko Ono: Peace, Planet and the Politics of Attention

Abstract

This talk focuses on the War is Over and Imagine Peace projects that Yoko Ono has pursued across an extraordinary range of materials, sites and practices, with and without collaborators, for more than 50 years. The projects raise compelling and timely questions concerning the role of art in transnational feminist, peace and environmental activisms. More strongly, Imagine Peace demonstrates how a deliberative conceptual art practice focused on, and generative of, (irenic) attention, can provide tools by which to connect ethico-political engagements across a global public sphere with ecological thinking on a planetary scale. This presentation will argue that Ono and her projects have too often been dismissed by populists (on the right) and revolutionaries (on the left), for their unapologetic esoteric inscrutability and/or gently utopian comedy, yet their relationships to the crucial and creative terrain of ‘positive peace’ and environmental justice has been left under-discussed.

About Marsha

Marsha Meskimmon is Professor of Transnational Art and Feminisms and Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Loughborough University (UK). She is widely published in the areas of global contemporary art, feminisms and, more latterly, environmental humanities. Meskimmon’s main research project currently is a Trilogy, Transnational Feminism and the Arts, the first two volumes of which have now been published: Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art: Entanglements and Intersections (2020) and Transnational Feminisms and Art’s Transhemispheric Histories: Ecologies and Genealogies (2023). The final volume, due to appear in 2025, will explore transnational feminisms and planetary aesthetics.

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