Pedro Reyes: 'Disarm', Centro de las Artes Inmersivas, Mexico City, Mexico

5 February 2026

From 28 January – 15 February, Centro de las Artes Inmersivas presents Pedro Reyes: 'Disarm'. For nearly two decades, Pedro Reyes has transformed firearms into musical instruments. Pistols, rifles, and machine guns are converted into guitars, flutes, or mechanized installations that can be seen in action in this exhibition.

These works fall within what the artist calls social sculpture: an artistic practice that seeks to go beyond the traditional aesthetic object in order to intervene in the social fabric and enable collective transformation. This project gave rise to DISARM (2012), in which Reyes collaborated with musicians and blacksmiths to transform 7,000 weapons collected in Ciudad Juárez into instruments, which have since been used in concerts around the world.

In response to the international reception of his work, Reyes noticed that these pieces were often interpreted primarily through the lens of violence in Mexico, whereas his true intention is to reveal the global nature of the arms industry. This realization led to Return to Sender (2020), created for the Tinguely Museum in Basel. This work presents a series of music boxes built from cut-up weapons by specific manufacturers: a box made from Beretta pistols plays a fragment of Vivaldi, while another, constructed from firearms produced by the Austrian company Glock, plays a fragment of Mozart. In this way, weapons from countries not typically perceived as violent are used to highlight how their products generate suffering around the world.

Image: Pedro Reyes, Disarm (Mechanized), 2012, Recycled Metal Installation comprising 6 mechanized instruments, Dimensions variable, © Pedro Reyes, Courtesy Lisson Gallery