Disarm at Lisson Gallery is a solo exhibition by Mexican artist Pedro Reyes, comprising mixed-media works and a live musical performance relating to the artist's ambitious international project in which illegal firearms were used to fabricate musical instruments.
Pedro Reyes’ work is a socio-political critique on contemporary society and our responsibility towards it. His projects are catalysts for communal and psychological transformation, triggering group interaction and creativity.
The exhibition at Lisson Gallery includes musical instruments created from firearms, including revolvers, shot-guns and machine-guns, which were crushed by tanks and steamrollers to render them useless. These were offered to the artist by the Mexican government following their confiscation and subsequent public destruction in the city of Ciudad, Juarez.
From the 6,700 destroyed weapons he received from the Mexican Secretary of Defense, Reyes created two groups of instruments which will be exhibited together for the first time at Lisson Gallery. The first, a series titled Imagine, is an orchestra of fifty instruments, from flutes to string and percussion instruments, designed to be played live. The second, Disarm, is a never-before-exhibited installation of mechanical musical instruments, which can either be automated or played live by an individual operator using a laptop computer or midi keyboard.
For Reyes the process of transforming weapons into objects of positive utility "... was more than physical. It’s important to consider that many lives were taken with these weapons; as if a sort of exorcism was taking place, the music expelled the demons they held, as well as being a requiem for the lives lost.”A series of collage paintings, Machine Music, present a utopian vision of a world in which heavy artillery has been converted into instruments of ‘sonic warfare’, with soldiers fighting in the field with musical instruments as their weapons. These surreal, science-fiction scenarios critique the ease with which radical developments in early 20th Century technology were swiftly appropriated by those finding new ways to kill more efficiently.
Disarm will be Reyes’ first show with Lisson Gallery and his first solo show in the UK. In July 2013, his ongoing performative project Sanatorium, last seen at dOCUMENTA 13, will form part of a major group exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. The gift of destroyed weapons from the government came as a result of the popularity of the artist’s earlier project, Palas Por Pistolas, in which 1,527 guns owned by the residents of Culiacán were melted down into 1,527 shovels, which were then used to plant 1,527 trees around the world. Reyes chose to plant a tree with one of these shovels on Mabley Green Meadow, Hackney, after The Serpentine Gallery invited him to the UK as part of the Map Marathon.
Image: © Pedro Reyes, Lisson Gallery
