A GAMeC press release

"Holocaust Day (January 27th) commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945 and has been instituted in memory of the genocide and persecution of the Jewish people and Italian deportees to the Nazi camps.

This year the Assessorato alla Cultura and GAMeC will commemorate this day through an exhibition of the works of Yoko Ono, following those by Fabio Mauri in 2005 and William Kentridge in 2006. The solo show consists of the installations We're All Water, the renewed version of Pieces of Sky and Mother Earth a new work realized for this occasion.

We're All Water, made in 2006, consists of a series of transparent glass bottles filled with water and labelled with the people's names. As the title suggests, Pieces of Sky is formed of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of the sky that each visitor can take. The work is sometimes contextualised by placing the "pieces of sky"in different containers, such as helmets from World War II, or, in this case, a funeral urn.

Mother Earth, the third work in the show, was specially devised by the artist for this event and is composed of three handfuls of earth from cemeteries of different religions - Christian, Muslim and Jewish; writings by the artist completed the work.

Yoko Ono has always explored the dynamics of participation and communication, arguing that while suffering exists in the world no personal happiness is possible as the experience of the individual is linked to its universal equivalent. Thus processes of individual transformation are identified with those of political transformation. Central themes of Ono's work are the concepts of love and peace, which the artist believes are the only way for humanity to create a better future for itself."

GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy (January 26th - February 25th 2007)

We're All Water and Mother Earth at GAMeC. © Matteo Bonaldi