IMAGINE PEACE: Studio Forum (Formerly JOY Forum)

Yoko Ono

Mark Titchner

Lawrence Weiner

Jeremy Deller

Eamon and Eddie O'Kane

David Hockney

Ciara Phillips

Bob and Roberta Smith

25 November - 12 December 2024

Open daily 16:00 – 18:00

Studio Forum 

(Formerly known as JOY Forum)

KMD, Møllendalsveien 61,

5009 Bergen, Norway

https://kmd.uib.no/en/Buildings-and-Facilities/studio

http://joyforum.uib.no/spesialsider/joy-forum

The STUDIO project at KMD explores studio practices and work processes in visual arts, music and design. STUDIO is funded by KORO Public Art Norway. In STUDIO Residency, the departments at KMD have invited artists and professionals to work in Bergen with projects related to studio practice.

Studio Forum is proud to present IMAGINE PEACE, a group exhibition bringing together leading international artists whose practices engage with language, image, and the radical potential of imagination as a civic act.

Taking its title from the enduring call by Yoko Ono, IMAGINE PEACE explores how artists mobilise words, signs, and visual form to articulate possibilities for solidarity, dissent, and renewal. At a moment of global uncertainty and cultural fragmentation, the exhibition proposes imagination not as escapism, but as a political and ethical force, a space in which alternative futures can be rehearsed.

The exhibition features work from private collections by Yoko Ono, Mark Titchner, Lawrence Weiner, Jeremy Deller, Eamon O'Kane and Eddie O'Kane, David Hockney, Ciara Phillips, and Bob and Roberta Smith. Spanning painting, text-based works, print, installation, and participatory practice, the exhibition traces a lineage of artistic strategies that treat language as material, at once declarative and open-ended.

Across generations, these artists have consistently challenged the boundaries between art and public life. From Ono’s concise, poetic instructions to Weiner’s foundational text works; from Deller’s socially engaged projects to Titchner’s bold typographic declarations; from Hockney’s luminous explorations of perception to Phillips’ collaborative print processes; from the painterly and generational dialogues of Eamon and Eddie O’Kane to the activist pedagogy of Bob and Roberta Smith each contributes to a shared inquiry into how art can frame collective experience.

IMAGINE PEACE is not a slogan but a proposition. It invites viewers to consider peace not as a static condition, but as an ongoing imaginative practice, enacted through language, gesture, image, and encounter.