Art of spring – why in Berlin peace is power

TEXT & PHOTOS: CORNELIA BRELOWSKI

The city is clad in bloom and green, ready for a new season. After the Easter break, during which the galleries and museums were mainly left to the first tidal wave of spring guests, the residents have now also flocked back into town – for work, school, or university respectively. The cultural calendar picks up speed as well, and the trick is not to feel overwhelmed, and go straight for the cherry picks.

One of the definitive cherries of this spring/summer season is the comprehensive Yoko Ono exhibition MUSIC OF THE MIND running until 31 August at Gropius Bau, focusing on her conceptual work, music and audio installations. One of her performances, CUT PIECE, will be brought to life by Berlin resident Peaches. Ono, who celebrated her 80th birthday on the Berlin Volksbühne stage in 2013, is today 92 years old and has remained a strong ambassador for peace – a recently rediscovered good, for due reasons.

In the atrium of the Gropius Bau, accessible free of charge, the installation Wish Tree for Berlin (1996/2025) can be seen alongside a banner from Ono’s ongoing campaign PEACE IS POWER (2017/2025). Visitors are invited to sit and contemplate the theme of peace as a positive and driving force, after having pinned their own peaceful wishes to one of the nine trees displayed across the atrium.

Yoko Ono and John Lennon, 1968. © Yoko Ono, Photo: Keith McMillan

MUSIC OF THE MIND coincides with the exhibition DREAM TOGETHER at the iconic Neue Nationalgalerie (11 April through 14 September), showing interactive art pieces from all phases of Ono’s work, while the Berlin art association n.b.k. will show TOUCH, a billboard campaign focusing on single words, in collaboration with the artist and her studio. It is following the presentation of FLY, which premiered during Berlin Art Week in 2024. Both works extend the artist’s engagement with billboards, a medium she has used since the 1960s – the most famous one being “WAR IS OVER! If You Want it” – exhibited at Times Square in New York ever since 1969, when it was erected by Ono and John Lennon.

Yoko Ono, Wish Tree, 1996. © Yoko Ono, Photo: Jason Branscun

Berlin in 2025 is a fitting place for a citywide exhibition on peace. The city whose residents found a way to peacefully reunite, thus triggering the end of the Cold War, is also the city which housed thousands of West German conscientious objectors when it was still a mere island within the GDR. Hamburg’s rock band Tocotronics, whose singer Dirk von Lowtzow has been a long term Berliner-of-Choice, published their album Nie wieder Krieg, citing German artist Käthe Kollwitz’ iconic 1924 poster, in 2022 – one month before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Coincidence or Zeitgeist? Whatsoever, in times of free-wheeling autocrats and with compulsory military service suddenly back in discussion, Berlin’s recent history keeps very much in tune with Yoko Ono’s words on the banner currently displayed in the atrium at Gropius Bau: “Peace is Power”.