IMAGINE PEACE with Yoko Ono

In a special collaboration, we brought the inimitable artist’s words to the streets of the UK capital in collaboration with disruptive art platform CIRCA. Eminent multimedia artist Yoko Ono has been flying the flag for peace for a long time. For too long. But she is steadfast in her devotion to stopping violence and conflict, so in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is once again lending her voice and platform to the anti-war movement. This time around, she’s teamed up with CIRCA (experts in art and culture with purpose) and Serpentine. Yoko has provided her word-dominated artwork IMAGINE PEACE, set to be sold in print to raise money for the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund. All of the proceeds from the prints will be given to the charity – while the artwork continues to interrupt metropolises by its daily display on some of the world’s most prominent digital screens, in the centres of London, Seoul, Melbourne, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Berlin, Milan, New York and Rome, showing every single night in March.

We were honoured to work with Yoko and CIRCA to supersize IMAGINE PEACE on the streets of London in paper and paste form, taking the words far and wide across the city. By using our sites to showcase the artwork, it reached out and shared Yoko’s message right within London’s communities – in Dalston Junction, Shepherd’s Bush, Shoreditch, and Southwark, amongst many other spots in the city. We also worked alongside original flyposting experts UNCLE to take Yoko’s message to some of the super-central, hard-to-reach places where it certainly needed to be seen.

Yoko was no stranger to bringing her activism to the streets. From taking over a Piccadilly Circus billboard in the late 1960s with late husband John Lennon, to self-funding a spot on one of the digital screens back in 2002, as CIRCA note, “Yoko Ono’s invitation to IMAGINE PEACE has been expressed since the early 2000s through billboards, advertisements, posters and tweets”, and has reached across the whole world. There was a refreshed urgency in the message this time around, while a new refugee crisis unfolded in Ukraine and millions of people began to suffer the consequences of the Russian invasion and yet another war.

Having Yoko’s IMAGINE PEACE displayed on the street acted as a public intervention and a call to attention. The simplicity of the artwork provided no distraction from its vital meaning and intended for audiences to genuinely perceive and contemplate the possibility of peace. We hoped that teaming up with CIRCA and Yoko for these interventions would maximise the impact of her words – providing reminders to instigate active solidarity throughout the city.

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