Yoko Ono, Add Colour (Refugee Boat) presented by the Tate Modern Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

Apr 6 2024

Location: 

London

Add Colour (Refugee Boat) begins as an all-white boat in an all-white room. Ono’s instruction for this collective, participatory work reads: ‘Just blue like the ocean.’ You are invited to contribute your hopes and beliefs in blue and white.

Ono conceived the work after being moved by international press coverage of the hundreds of thousands of refugees risking their lives to travel to Europe by sea. This participatory work invites you to reflect on this urgent and ongoing refugee crisis. The United Nations Refugee Agency predicts that, in 2024, the number of people across the world forcibly displaced and stateless will rise to more than 130 million.

Ono made her first Add Colour work at her Chambers Street loft in 1961, splattering sumi ink onto a long stretch of raw canvas. She developed the idea in 1966, at Indica Gallery in London, inviting her audience to add colours to small blank canvases to make a collective work of art. With Add Colour (Refugee Boat), Ono invites us to consider the impact collective action can have. The work encapsulates her belief in human agency and her understanding that ‘we are sharing this world’ and sharing our responsibility for it.

External sources: 

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/yoko-ono/exhibition-guide
Posted by JFerragamo on Apr 14 2024

Staff rating: 

0

Effectiveness

How does this project help?

Activates (people)Energizes and organizes people into action. Can include emotion work
Amplifies (issue or campaign)Brings public and political attention to an issue or campaign.  Can include prefigurative action, making the invisible visible.
OtherHelps bring about change in a way not accounted for in the options above. Please describe how it does this in the text box below.
Strengthens (community)Strengthens, builds and celebrates community through ritual and/or symbol.

Timeframe For change

This project seems to be part of a campaign with a clear long-term goal. Long-term goals tend to be things like: end racism; end homophobia; make the sun stand still in the sky. A campaign with a long-term goal also needs to have some kind of theory of change.
The long-term goal involves raising awareness for change in how Europe treats those seeking refuge. The work centers on self-reflection and introspection.

Notes

I think this project is generally affective - it's impressive and visually impactful. It also invites deep thought about the issue. That said, it does not appear as though there is long-term substantive change that has resulted.